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<h2> Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies </h2>
<p>1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood and
leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence and
execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions doubtless
springs from the same social conditions which produce the former conflict;
but certain definite problems of education connected with them make it
desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the relationship and alleged
separation of knowing and doing.</p>
<p>The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has a
long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned takes
us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated by Plato
and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many respects, they
agreed in identifying experience with purely practical concerns; and hence
with material interests as to its purpose and with the body as to its
organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own sake free from
practical reference, and found its source and organ in a purely immaterial
mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal interests. Again, experience
always involved lack, need, desire; it was never self-sufficing. Rational
knowing on the other hand, was complete and comprehensive within itself.
Hence the practical life was in a condition of perpetual flux, while
intellectual knowledge concerned eternal truth.</p>
<p>This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian philosophy
began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of knowledge and
conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it hit upon reason as
the only adequate guide of belief and activity. Since custom and tradition
were identified with experience, it followed at once that reason was
superior to experience. Moreover, experience, not content with its proper
position of subordination, was the great foe to the acknowledgment of the
authority of reason. Since custom and traditionary beliefs held men in
bondage, the struggle of reason for its legitimate supremacy could be won
only by showing the inherently unstable and inadequate nature of
experience. The statement of Plato that philosophers should be kings may
best be understood as a statement that rational intelligence and not
habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion should regulate human affairs. The
former secures unity, order, and law; the latter signify multiplicity and
discord, irrational fluctuations from one estate to another.</p>
<p>The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel, colonizations,
migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. The customs
and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply from
one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens; the fortunes
of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. The increase of
leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had brought into ken
many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity and speculation. The
situation tended to raise the question as to the existence of anything
constant and universal in the realm of nature and society. Reason was the
faculty by which the universal principle and essence is apprehended; while
the senses were the organs of perceiving change,—the unstable and
the diverse as against the permanent and uniform. The results of the work
of the senses, preserved in memory and imagination, and applied in the
skill given by habit, constituted experience.</p>
<p>Experience at its best is thus represented in the various handicrafts—the
arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player, the soldier, have
undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the skill they have.
This means that the bodily organs, particularly the senses, have had
repeated contact with things and that the result of these contacts has
been preserved and consolidated till ability in foresight and in practice
had been secured. Such was the essential meaning of the term "empirical."
It suggested a knowledge and an ability not based upon insight into
principles, but expressing the result of a large number of separate
trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by "method of trial and error,"
with especial emphasis upon the more or less accidental character of the
trials. So far as ability of control, of management, was concerned, it
amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine. If new circumstances
resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in which they
deviated, failure was likely. Even to-day to speak of a physician as an
empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific training, and that he is
proceeding simply on the basis of what he happens to have got out of the
chance medley of his past practice. Just because of the lack of science or
reason in "experience" it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric
easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge
begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he
begins to pretend—to make claims for which there is no
justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others—to
"bluff." Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he
knows others—as the history of Athens showed that the common
craftsmen thought they could manage household affairs, education, and
politics, because they had learned to do the specific things of their
trades. Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of
sham, of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon
which reason lays hold.</p>
<p>The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state of
affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of wants
and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the life of the
body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life. Experience thus
has a definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in
relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the
immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is something morally dangerous
about experience, as such words as sensual, carnal, material, worldly,
interests suggest; while pure reason and spirit connote something morally
praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the
inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to
experience. Its material is inherently variable and untrustworthy. It is
anarchic, because unstable. The man who trusts to experience does not know
what he depends upon, since it changes from person to person, from day to
day, to say nothing of from country to country. Its connection with the
"many," with various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries
conflict in its train.</p>
<p>Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within the
individual and between individuals. From experience no standard of belief
can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to instigate all
kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom proved. Its
logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the particular
individual which his experience leads him to believe true and good at a
particular time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity within
experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To produce or to
make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. All the obnoxious
characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves to doing while
knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp a thing
intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of
vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched by
the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal and the
universal. And the world of experience can be brought under control, can
be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law of reason.</p>
<p>It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly influenced
men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education. The contempt
for physical as compared with mathematical and logical science, for the
senses and sense observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and
worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with
the concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively
brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the depreciation of
arts and crafts as intellectual instrumentalities, all sought shelter and
found sanction under this estimate of the respective values of experience
and reason—or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and the
intellectual. Medieval philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition.
To know reality meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God,
and to enjoy the eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme
reality was the ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate.
Experience had to do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs,
practically necessary indeed, but of little import in comparison with
supernatural objects of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force
derived from the literary character of the Roman education and the Greek
philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies
which obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes,
we can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in
educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The Modern Theory
of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see later, the development of
experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates a
radical transformation of the view just set forth. But before coming to
that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge developed in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it presents us with
an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine of the relations of
experience and reason. To Plato experience meant habituation, or the
conservation of the net product of a lot of past chance trials. Reason
meant the principle of reform, of progress, of increase of control.
Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking through the limitations of
custom and getting at things as they really were. To the modern reformers,
the situation was the other way around. Reason, universal principles, a
priori notions, meant either blank forms which had to be filled in by
experience, by sense observations, in order to get significance and
validity; or else were mere indurated prejudices, dogmas imposed by
authority, which masqueraded and found protection under august names. The
great need was to break way from captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon
put it, "anticipated nature" and imposed merely human opinions upon her,
and to resort to experience to find out what nature was like. Appeal to
experience marked the breach with authority. It meant openness to new
impressions; eagerness in discovery and invention instead of absorption in
tabulating and systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of
the relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over them
by preconceived ideas.</p>
<p>The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it had
borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing and being
done to, and became a name for something intellectual and cognitive. It
meant the apprehension of material which should ballast and check the
exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic empiricist and by his
opponent, experience has been looked upon just as a way of knowing. The
only question was how good a way it is. The result was an even greater
"intellectualism" than is found in ancient philosophy, if that word be
used to designate an emphatic and almost exclusive interest in knowledge
in its isolation. Practice was not so much subordinated to knowledge as
treated as a kind of tag-end or aftermath of knowledge. The educational
result was only to confirm the exclusion of active pursuits from the
school, save as they might be brought in for purely utilitarian ends—the
acquisition by drill of certain habits. In the second place, the interest
in experience as a means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to
looking at the mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the
more truly objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a
hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to
vitiate true knowledge—to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a
maximum of receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by
objects were generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a
doctrine of sensationalism—that is to say, a doctrine which
identified knowledge with the reception and association of sensory
impressions. In John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we
find this sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental
faculties, like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction,
and generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account, such
as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See ante, p.
61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the latter part
of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they
regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the
conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held that the mind is a
blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing engraved on it at birth
(a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas were concerned, but had
endowed it with activities to be exercised upon the material received. His
French successors razed away the powers and derived them also from
impressions received.</p>
<p>As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest in
education as method of social reform. (See ante, p. 93.) The emptier the
mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by bringing
the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius, perhaps the most
extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that education could do
anything—that it was omnipotent. Within the sphere of school
instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office in protesting
against mere book learning. If knowledge comes from the impressions made
upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure knowledge without
the use of objects which impress the mind. Words, all kinds of linguistic
symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of objects with which they may
be associated, convey nothing but sensations of their own shape and color—certainly
not a very instructive kind of knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely
handy weapon with which to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly
upon tradition and authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a
test: Where are the real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are
received? If such objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as
the result of false associations and combinations. Empiricism also
insisted upon a first-hand element. The impression must be made upon me,
upon my mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand source
of knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the
resulting idea.</p>
<p>As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance
was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced into the
schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about the
way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far, there is nothing to
complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to
influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent
full good being got from them. "Object lessons" tended to isolate the mere
sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the object,
the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the
sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. The theory worked not only in the
direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce instruction
to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good like any
gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to the neglect of
thinking. According to the theory there was no need of thinking in
connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict theory such thinking
would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking consisted simply in
combining and separating sensory units which had been received without any
participation of judgment.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education upon
a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least after
the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused it to be
resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge (that is to
say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and modes of
application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for lending greater
"interest" to barren symbols. There are at least three serious defects of
sensationalistic empiricism as an educational philosophy of knowledge. (a)
the historical value of the theory was critical; it was a dissolvent of
current beliefs about the world and political institutions. It was a
destructive organ of criticism of hard and fast dogmas. But the work of
education is constructive, not critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be
eliminated and revised, but the need of building up new experience into
intellectual habitudes as correct as possible from the start.
Sensationalism is highly unfitted for this constructive task. Mind,
understanding, denotes responsiveness to meanings (ante, p. 29), not
response to direct physical stimuli. And meaning exists only with
reference to a context, which is excluded by any scheme which identifies
knowledge with a combination of sense-impressions. The theory, so far as
educationally applied, led either to a magnification of mere physical
excitations or else to a mere heaping up of isolated objects and
qualities.</p>
<p>(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it also
has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance with
the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give reality to
ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the senses, and as a
means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one thing. As an end-all and
be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally restricted. In precisely
analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and counters may be helpful aids to a
realization of numerical relations, but when employed except as aids to
thought—the apprehension of meaning—they become an obstacle to
the growth of arithmetical understanding. They arrest growth on a low
plane, the plane of specific physical symbols. Just as the race developed
especial symbols as tools of calculation and mathematical reasonings,
because the use of the fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the
individual must progress from concrete to abstract symbols—that is,
symbols whose meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And
undue absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers
this growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter of
activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with things.
What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received quality
impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of handling,
throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the consequent
effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (See ante, p. 140.)
Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of
experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion
of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The neglect of the
deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal defect of
the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more uninteresting and
mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which ignores and as far as may
be excludes the natural tendency to learn about the qualities of objects
by the uses to which they are put through trying to do something with
them.</p>
<p>It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished a
satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational influence
was confined to injecting a new factor into the older curriculum, with
incidental modifications of the older studies and methods. It introduced
greater regard for observation of things directly and through pictures and
graphic descriptions, and it reduced the importance attached to verbal
symbolization. But its own scope was so meager that it required
supplementation by information concerning matters outside of
sense-perception and by matters which appealed more directly to thought.
Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of informational and abstract,
or "rationalistic" studies.</p>
<p>3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience justified
by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern
scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the primary
position of active response which puts things to use and which learns
about them through discovering the consequences that result from use. It
would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an
infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that he
is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated ready-made
qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would be seen that the
infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling, reaching, etc., in
order to see what results follow upon motor response to a sensory
stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not isolated
qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing, and the
changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected to
produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will do
in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what things
do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in modifying our
actions, furthering some of them and resisting and checking others, and
what we can do to them in producing new changes constitutes experience.
The methods of science by which the revolution in our knowledge of the
world dating from the seventeenth century, was brought about, teach the
same lesson. For these methods are nothing but experimentation carried out
under conditions of deliberate control. To the Greek, it seemed absurd
that such an activity as, say, the cobbler punching holes in leather, or
using wax and needle and thread, could give an adequate knowledge of the
world. It seemed almost axiomatic that for true knowledge we must have
recourse to concepts coming from a reason above experience. But the
introduction of the experimental method signified precisely that such
operations, carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in
which fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested. In other words,
it is only needed to conduct such an operation as the pouring of an acid
on a metal for the purpose of getting knowledge instead of for the purpose
of getting a trade result, in order to lay hold of the principle upon
which the science of nature was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions
were indeed indispensable, but there was less reliance upon sense
perceptions in their natural or customary form than in the older science.
They were no longer regarded as containing within themselves some "form"
or "species" of universal kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be
stripped off by rational thought. On the contrary, the first thing was to
alter and extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given
objects of sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all
sorts of experimental devices. To accomplish this in a way which would
arouse new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas
(like those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science.
But these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge in
themselves. They were implements for instituting, conducting, interpreting
experimental inquiries and formulating their results.</p>
<p>The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge, a
philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing of
what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of
suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
and method, it becomes reasonable—rational. When what we suffer from
things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant—enlightening
and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
justification.</p>
<p>The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which can
be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow and
trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on under
the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external result.
But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the time when it
is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It is inexpedient to
repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on thinking and on the
evolution of educative subject matter from childlike work and play to
logically organized subject matter. The discussions of this chapter and
the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to those results.</p>
<p>(i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
subsisting between a human being and his natural and social surroundings.
In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the side of the
environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain checkings and
deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of surrounding
things and persons carries to a successful issue the active tendencies of
the individual, so that in the end what the individual undergoes are
consequences which he has himself tried to produce. In just the degree in
which connections are established between what happens to a person and
what he does in response, and between what he does to his environment and
what it does in response to him, his acts and the things about him acquire
meaning. He learns to understand both himself and the world of men and
things. Purposive education or schooling should present such an
environment that this interaction will effect acquisition of those
meanings which are so important that they become, in turn, instruments of
further learnings. (ante, Ch. XI.) As has been repeatedly pointed out,
activity out of school is carried on under conditions which have not been
deliberately adapted to promoting the function of understanding and
formation of effective intellectual dispositions. The results are vital
and genuine as far as they go, but they are limited by all kinds of
circumstances. Some powers are left quite undeveloped and undirected;
others get only occasional and whimsical stimulations; others are formed
into habits of a routine skill at the expense of aims and resourceful
initiative and inventiveness. It is not the business of the school to
transport youth from an environment of activity into one of cramped study
of the records of other men's learning; but to transport them from an
environment of relatively chance activities (accidental in the relation
they bear to insight and thought) into one of activities selected with
reference to guidance of learning. A slight inspection of the improved
methods which have already shown themselves effective in education will
reveal that they have laid hold, more or less consciously, upon the fact
that "intellectual" studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits
represent an intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp
the principle with greater firmness.</p>
<p>(ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social life
tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will
intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in mind
the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle Ages,
where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were
mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is
not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted to
cultivate intelligence. But now that even the occupations of the
household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation and
intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands otherwise.
It is true that many of those who now engage in them are not aware of the
intellectual content upon which their personal actions depend. But this
fact only gives an added reason why schooling should use these pursuits so
as to enable the coming generation to acquire a comprehension now too
generally lacking, and thus enable persons to carry on their pursuits
intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) The most direct blow at the
traditional separation of doing and knowing and at the traditional
prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has been given by the
progress of experimental science. If this progress has demonstrated
anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and
fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing. The analysis and
rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge
and power of explanation and right classification cannot be attained
purely mentally—just inside the head. Men have to do something to
the things when they wish to find out something; they have to alter
conditions. This is the lesson of the laboratory method, and the lesson
which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a discovery of the
condition under which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not
merely externally productive. If, in too many cases at present, it results
only in the acquisition of an additional mode of technical skill, that is
because it still remains too largely but an isolated resource, not
resorted to until pupils are mostly too old to get the full advantage of
it, and even then is surrounded by other studies where traditional methods
isolate intellect from activity.</p>
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<h2> Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing </h2>
<p>failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus
they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other
source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted, the
more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified with what
men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of life, doing
shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell in with many
others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods and topics which
involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily activity. The
modern age began with a revolt against this point of view, with an appeal
to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely rational concepts on
the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the results of
concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions of prejudice and
institutionalized class interest, calling themselves rational for
protection. But various circumstances led to considering experience as
pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic active and emotional
phases, and to identifying it with a passive reception of isolated
"sensations." Hence the education reform effected by the new theory was
confined mainly to doing away with some of the bookishness of prior
methods; it did not accomplish a consistent reorganization.</p>
<p>Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of the
ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive—a
matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the ancient
theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so as to
take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as to
result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and ideal
faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan for
the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
previous chapters.</p>
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