a journal of the international council of
philosophical inquiry with children
John Dewey on
Children, Childhood, and Education
It is difficult to
find just one place to look for children and childhood in the American philosopher
John Dewey’s work. This is not because
he uses the terms so often, but because the concept of childhood pervades his
opus in and through another set of terms—development, growth, experience,
plasticity, habit, impulse, and education.
In Dewey’s language, none of these terms mean quite what they mean in
other thinkers’ language, and especially not in the language of the human
development theorists of the early twentieth century and after, who based their
thinking on a monological, unidirectional developmental trajectory that could
be applied at all levels of the evolutionary continuum. Dewey is an
interactionist through and through, and thus all his terms should be understood
as dialectical. He does not invoke the
concept “child” without invoking the concept “adult,” nor does he describe
anything that does not have a normative dimension, which by definition belies
“pure” description. His is a language of
possibility, and the limits of human possibility are incalculable. This is why the concept of childhood is so
important in his work.
Like his
contemporary Freud—but perhaps more radically because he invokes education as
reconstruction while Freud only knows education as resignation—Dewey breaks
down the dividing line between child and adult.
Since “life is development, and . . . developing, growing, is life,”
both adult and child are under the same law.
The developmental sclerosis of adults and the scandalously imperfect
culture they compulsively maintain is a historical situation, which means it
could be different. And the calculus of
that difference in fact resides just in the way adults relate to the children
who are in their power—that is, in education.
For Dewey, education
is the cultural location where the human capacity for reconstruction can either
be facilitated or suppressed. This makes
of education a political location as well—profoundly political because it is
about cultural politics and the politics of subjectivity. Dewey is scandalized
that adults use children’s greatest power—which he calls “plasticity”—to render
them weak, to construct the docile body, to, in his words, subject them to “an
impatient, premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed
pattern of adult habits of thought and affection”—in short, to violate the
possibility represented by the one unique characteristic of the human
species—what he calls “prolonged infancy,” or neoteny. This violation of the
young represents for him the very nexus of cultural repression, and the point
of blockage of the possibility for peace and justice in the human domain. As
such, for Dewey, the possibilities offered by education are the possibilities
offered the species, and thus the school becomes in his thinking an institution
upon which the greatest stakes converge.
He may have been naïve, or made a colossal category mistake; that is, it
could be that the school merely follows and reproduces, rather than initiates,
deep cultural change. But whether he is
right or wrong about that, his insight into fundamental importance of the
adult-child relation for the possibility of cultural transformation remains.
What follows are
selections from two works, the first emerging at the sickening epicenter of the
Great War, in 1916—a war in which youth was sacrificed to what he calls adult
“infantilisms” on a historically unprecedented scale, and a war that, arguably,
effectively suppressed the educational possibilities his work represents for
the rest of the century. Democracy and Education (
The next selections
are from Human Nature and Conduct (
From
Democracy and Education (pp. 41-53,
passim)
The primary condition of growth
is immaturity. This may seem to be a
mere truism—saying that a being can develop only in some point in which he is
undeveloped. But the prefix “im” of the word immaturity means something
positive, not a mere void or lack. It is
noteworthy that the terms “capacity” and “potentiality” have a double meaning,
one sense being negative, the other positive.
Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like the capacity of a quart
measure. We may mean by potentiality a
merely dormant or quiescent state—a capacity to become something different
under external influences. But we also
mean by capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now when we say that immaturity means the
possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers which may
exist at a later time; we express a force positively present—the ability to develop.
Our
tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something which fills
up the gap between the immature and the mature, is due to regarding childhood comparatively instead of
intrinsically. We treat it simply as a
privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has
not, and will not have till he becomes a man.
This comparative standpoint is legitimate enough for some purposes, but
if we make it final, the question arises whether we are not guilty of an
overweening presumption. Children, if
they could express themselves articulately and sincerely, would tell a
different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for the conviction that
for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as little
children.
The
seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality of the possibilities of
immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it sets up as an ideal and standard
a static end. The fulfillment of growing
is taken to mean an accomplished growth:
that is to say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. The futility of the assumption is seen in the
fact that every adult resents the imputation of having no further possibilities
of growth; and so far as he finds that they are closed to him mourns the fact
as evidence of loss, instead of falling back on the achieved as adequate
manifestation of power. Why an unequal
measure for child and man?
Taken
absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a positive force or
ability—the power to grow. We do not have to draw out or educe positive
activities from a child, as some educational doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager
and impassioned activities. Growth is
not something that is done to them; it is something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of
possibility gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
dependence and plasticity. (1) It sounds
absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive, still more absurd as
a power. Yet if helplessness were all
there were in dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent being has to be carried,
forever, by others. The fact that dependence is accompanied by growth in
ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into parasitism, suggest that it is
already something constructive. Being
merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For (2) it would only build a wall around
impotence. With reference to the
physical world, the child is helpless.
He lacks at birth and for a long time thereafter power to make his way
physically, to make his own living. If
he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an hour. On this side his helplessness is almost
complete. The young of the brutes are
immeasurably his superiors. He is
physically weak and not able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping
with the physical environment.
1. The thoroughgoing character of this
helplessness suggests, however, some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an early
period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound up with the
life of those about them. They are
compelled, so to speak, to have physical gifts because they are lacking in
social gifts. Human infants, on the
other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just because of their social
capacity. We sometimes talk and think as
if they simply happened to be physically
in a social environment, as if social forces exclusively existed in the adults
who take care of them, they being passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
marvelously endowed with power to
enlist the cooperative attention of others, this would be thought to be a
backhanded way of saying that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of
children. But observation shows that
children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for social intercourse.
Few grown-up persons retain all of the flexible and sensitive ability of
children to vibrate sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those
about them. Inattention to physical
things (going with incapacity to control them) is accompanied by a
corresponding intensification of interest and attention as to the doings of
people. The native mechanism of the
child and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness. The statement that children, before
adolescence, are egotistically self-centered, even if it were true, would not
contradict the truth of this statement.
It would simply indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on
their own behalf, not that it does not exist.
But the statement is not true as matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the
alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness with
which they go to their mark. If the ends
which form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because
adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these
ends, which have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the remainder of children’s alleged
native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter to an adult’s egoism. To a grown-up person who is too absorbed in
his own affairs to take an interest in children’s affairs, children doubtless
seem unreasonably engrossed in their
own affairs.
From
a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it
involves interdependence. There is
always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social
capacity of an individual. In making him
more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to
aloofness and indifference. It often
makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an
illusion of being really able to stand and act alone—an unnamed form of
insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of
the world.
2. The specific adaptability of an immature
creature for growth constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a
capacity to take on change of form in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable elasticity by which some
persons take on the color of their surrounding while retaining their own
bent. But it is something deeper than
this. It is essentially the ability to
learn from experience; the power to retain from one experience something which
is of avail in coping with the difficulties of a later situation. This means power to modify actions on the
basis of the results of prior experience, the power to develop dispositions.
Without it, the acquisition of habits is impossible.
It
is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and especially the
human young, have to learn to utilize
their instinctive reactions. The human
being is born with a greater number of instinctive tendencies than other
animals. But the instincts of the lower
animals perfect themselves for appropriate action at an early period after
birth, while most of those of the human infants are of little account just as
they stand. An original specialized
power of adjustment secures immediate efficiency, but, like a railway ticket,
it is good for one route only. A being
who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands, and legs, has to experiment in
making varied combinations of their reactions, achieves a control that is
flexible and varied. A chick, for
example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few hours after hatching. This means that definite coordinations of
activities of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are
perfected in a few trials. An infant
requires about six months to be able to gauge with approximate accuracy the
action in reaching which will coordinate with his visual activities; to be
able, that is, to tell whether he can reach a seen object and just how to
execute the reaching. As a result, the
chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment. The infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative
reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is at a
temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning an action, instead of having it
given readymade, one of necessity learns to vary its factors, to make varied
combinations of them, according to change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing progress is
opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for
use in other situations. Still more
important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.
The
importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and variable control
has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance of prolonged
infancy. This prolongation is
significant from the standpoint of the adult members of the group as well as
from that of the young. The presence of
dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to nurture and affection. The need for constant continued care was
probably a chief means in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent
unions. It certainly was a chief
influence in forming habits of affectionate and sympathetic watchfulness; that
constructive interest in the well-being of others which is essential to
associated life. Intellectually, this
moral development meant the introduction of many new objects of attention; it
stimulated foresight and planning for the future. Thus there is a reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of social life requires
a longer period of infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this
prolongation of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of
acquiring variable and novel modes of control.
Hence it provides a further push to social progress.
We
have already noted that plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over
from prior experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This signifies the capacity to develop
habits, or develop definite dispositions. . . . [T]he acquiring of habits is
due to an original plasticity of our natures: to our ability to vary our
responses till we find an appropriate and efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that possess us
instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity. They mark the close of power to vary. There can be no doubt of the tendency of
organic plasticity, of the physiological basis, to lessen with growing
years. The instinctively mobile and
eagerly varying action of childhood, the love of new stimuli and new
developments, too easily passes into a “settling down,” which means aversion to
change and a resting on past achievements.
Only an environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the
process of forming habits can counteract this tendency. Of course, the same hardening of the organic
conditions affects the physiological structures which are involved in
thinking. But this fact only indicates
the need of persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method which falls back
on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external efficiency of habit,
motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a deliberate closing in of
surrounding upon growth.
.
. . life is development, and . . .
developing, growing, is life. . . . The child has specific powers; to ignore
that fact is to stunt or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. The
adult uses his powers to transform his environment, thereby occasioning new
stimuli which redirect his powers and keep them developing. Ignoring this fact
means arrested development, a passive accommodation. Normal child and normal adult alike, in other
words, are engaged in growing. The
difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth, but
between the modes of growth appropriate to different conditions. With respect to the development of powers
devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems, we may say
the child should be growing in manhood.
With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and
openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the other.
Three
ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative nature of
immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and rigidity of habit,
are all connected with a false idea of growth or development,—that it is a
movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
regarded as having and end, instead
of being an end. The educational counterparts of the three
fallacious ideas are first, failure to take account of the instinctive or
native powers of the young; secondly, failure to develop initiative in coping
with novel situations; thirdly, an undue emphasis upon drill and other devices
which secure automatic skill at the expense of personal perception. In all cases, the adult environment is
accepted as a standard for the child. He
is to be brought up to it.
Natural
instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances—as obnoxious traits to
be suppressed, or al all events to be brought into conformity with external
standards. Since conformity is the aim,
what is distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or
regarded as a source of mischief or anarchy.
Conformity is made equivalent to uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of
interest in the novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the
unknown. Since the end of growth is
outside of and beyond the process of growing, external agents have to be
resorted to to induce movement toward it.
Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.
.
. . education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure
growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look with impatience upon
immaturity, regarding it as something to be got over as rapidly as
possible. Then the adult formed by such
educative methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as
a scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. This ironical situation will endure till it
is recognized that living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business
of education is with that quality.
Realization
that life is growth protects us from that so-called idealizing of childhood
which in effect is nothing but lazy indulgence.
Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and interest. Even though it is not always easy to tell
whether what appears to be mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as
yet untrained power, we must remember that manifestations are not to be
accepted as ends in themselves. They are
signs of possible growth. They are to be
turned into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or
cultivated for their own sake. Excessive
attention to surface phenomena (even in the way of rebuke as well as
encouragement) may lead to their fixation and thus to arrested
development. What impulses are moving
toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and
teacher. The true principal of respect
for immaturity cannot be better put than in the words of Emerson: “Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies to this
suggestion: Would you verily throw up
the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to
the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a
respect for the child’s nature? I
answer,—Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. .
. . The two points in a boy’s training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep his natural, but stop off his uproar,
fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and
arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points.” And as Emerson goes on to show this reverence
for childhood and youth instead of opening up an easy and easy-going path to
the instructors, “involves at once, immense claims on the time, the thought, on
the life of the teacher. It requires
time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God; and
only to think of using it implies character and profoundness.”
Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others
and plasticity. Both of these conditions
are at their height in childhood and youth.
Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of
habits. Habits give control over the
environment, power to utilize it for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or
a general and persistent balance of organic activities with surroundings, and
of active capacities to readjust activities to meet new conditions. The former furnishes the background of
growth; the latter constitute growing.
Active habits involve thought, invention, and initiative in apply
capacities to new aims. They are opposed
to routine which marks an arrest of growth.
Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with
growing; it has no end beyond itself.
The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it
creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire
effective in fact.
From
Human Nature and Conduct, pp. 46-89,
passim
. . . we return to our special
problem, which is how the rigid character of past custom has unfavorable
influenced beliefs, emotions and purposes having to do with morals.
We
come back to the fact that individuals begin their career as infants. For the plasticity of the young presents a
temptation to those having greater experience and hence greater power which
they rarely resist. It seems putty to be
molded according to current designs.
That plasticity also means power to change prevailing customs is
ignored. Docility is looked upon not as
ability to learn whatever the world has to teach, but as subjection to those
instructions of others which reflect their
current habits. To be truly docile
is to be eager to learn all the lessons of active, inquiring, expanding
experience. The inert, stupid quality of
current customs perverts learning into a willingness to follow where others
point the way, into conformity, constriction, surrender of skepticism and
experiment. When we think of the
docility of the young we first think of the stocks of information adults wish
to impose and the ways of acting they want to reproduce. Then we think of the insolent coercions, the
insinuating briberies, the pedagogic solemnities by which the freshness of
youth can be faded and its vivid curiosities dulled. Education becomes the art of taking advantage
of the helplessness of the young: the
forming of habits becomes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom.
.
. . . In a definite sense, then, human society is always starting afresh. It is always in the process of renewing, and
it endures only because of renewal. We
speak of the peoples of southern
For
the most part, this continual alteration has been unconscious and
unintended. Immature, undeveloped
activity has succeeded in modifying adult organized activity accidentally and
surreptitiously. But with the dawn of
the idea of progressive betterment and an interest in new uses of impulses,
there has grown up some consciousness of the extent to what a future new
society of changed purposes and desires may be created by a deliberate humane
treatment of the impulses of youth. This
is the meaning of education; for a truly human education consists in an
intelligent direction of native activities in the light of the possibilities
and necessities of the social situation.
But for the most part, adults have given training rather than
education. An impatient, premature
mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits of
thought and affection has been desired.
The combined effect of love of power, timidity in the face of the novel
and a self-admiring complacency has been too strong to permit immature impulse
to exercise its reorganizing potentialities.
The younger generation has hardly even knocked frankly at the door of
adult customs, much less been invited in to rectify through better education
the brutalities and inequities of established adult habits. Each new generation has crept blindly and
furtively through such chance gaps as have happened to be left open. Otherwise it has modeled after the old.
We
have already noted how original plasticity is warped and docility is taken mean
advantage of. It has been used to
signify not capacity to learn liberally and generously, but willingness to
learn the customs of adult associates, ability to learn just those special
things which those having over and authority wish to teach. Original modifiability has not been given a
fair chance to act as a trustee for a better human life. It has been loaded with convention, biased by
adult convenience. It has been practically
rendered into an equivalent of non-assertion of originality, a pliant
accommodation to the embodied opinions of others.
Consequently
docility has been identified with imitativeness, instead of with power to
re-make old habits, to re-create.
Plasticity and originality have been opposed to each other. That the most precious part of plasticity
consists in ability to form habits of independent judgment and of inventive
initiation has been ignored. For it
demands a more complete and intense docility to form flexible easily
re-adjusted habits than it does to acquire those which rigidly copy the ways of
others. In short, among the native
activities of the young are some that work towards accommodation, assimilation,
reproduction, and others that work toward exploration, discovery and
creation. But the weight of adult custom
has been thrown upon retaining and strengthening tendencies toward conformity,
and against those which make for variation and independence. The habits of the growing person are
jealously kept within the limit of adult customs. The delightful originality of the child is
tamed. Worship of institutions and
personages themselves lacking in imaginative foresight, versatile observation
and liberal thought, is enforced.
Very
early in life sets of mind are formed without attentive thought, and these sets
persist and control the mature mind. The
child learns to avoid the shock and unpleasant disagreement, to find the easy
way out, to appear to conform to customs which are wholly mysterious to him in
order to get his own way—that is to display some natural impulse without
exciting the unfavorable notice of those in authority. Adults distrust the intelligence which a
child has while making upon him demands for a kind of conduct that requires a
high order of intelligence, if it is to be intelligent at all. The inconsistency is reconciled by instilling
in him “moral” habits which have a maximum of emotional impressments and
adamantine hold with a minimum of understanding. These habitudes, deeply ingrained before
thought is awake and even before the day of experiences which can later be
recalled, govern conscious later thoughts.
They are usually deepest and most un-get-at-able just where critical
thought is most needed—in morals, religion, and politics. These “infantilisms” account for the mass of
irrationalities which prevail among men of otherwise rational tastes. These personal “hang-overs” are the cause of
what the student of culture calls survivals. But unfortunately these survivals
are much more numerous and pervasive than the anthropologist and historian are
wont to admit. To list them would perhaps oust one from “respectable” society.
And
yet the intimation never wholly deserts us that there is in the unformed
activities of childhood and youth the possibilities of a better life for the community
as well as for individuals here and there.
This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of
childhood. For with all its
extravagancies and uncertainties, its effusions and reticences, it remains a
standing proof of a life wherein growth is normal not an anomaly, activity a
delight not a task, and where habit-forming is an expansion of power not its
shrinkage. Habit and impulse may war
with each other, but it is a combat between the habits of adults and the
impulses of the young, and not, as with the adult, a civil warfare whereby
personality is rent asunder. Our usual
measure for the “goodness” of children is the amount of trouble they make for
grownups, which means of course the amount they deviate from adult habits and
expectations. Yet by way of expiation
we envy children their love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting
the last drop of significance from each new situation, their vital seriousness
in things that to us are outworn.
We
compensate for the harshness and monotony of our present insistence upon formed
habits by imagining a future heaven in which we too shall respond freshly and
generously to each incident of life. In
consequence of our divided attitude, our ideals are self-contradictory. On the one hand, we dream of an attained
perfection, an ultimate static goal, in which effort shall cease, and desire
and execution be once and for all in complete equilibrium. We wish for a
character which shall be steadfast, and we then conceive this desired
faithfulness as something immutable, a character exactly the same yesterday,
today and forever. But we also have a
sneaking sympathy for the courage of an Emerson in declaring that consistency
should be thrown to the winds when it stands between us and the opportunities
of present life. We reach out to the
opposite extreme of our ideal of fixity, and under the guise of a return to
nature dream of a romantic freedom, in which all life is plastic to impulse, a continual source of improvised
spontaneities and novel inspirations. We
rebel against all organization and stability. If modern thought and sentiment
is to escape from this division in its ideas, it must be through utilizing
released impulse as an agent of steady reorganization of custom and
institutions.
While
childhood is the conspicuous proof of the renewing of habit rendered possible
by impulse, the latter never wholly ceases to play its refreshing role in adult
life. If it did, life would petrify,
society stagnate. Instinctive reactions
are sometimes too intense to be woven into a smooth pattern of habits. Under ordinary circumstances they appear to
be tamed to obey their master, custom.
But extraordinary crises release them and they show by wild violent
energy how superficial is the control of routine. The saying that civilization is only skin
deep, that a savage persists beneath the clothes of a civilized man, is the
common acknowledgment of this fact. At
critical moments of unusual stimuli the emotional outbreak and rush of
instincts dominating all activity show how superficial is the modification
which a rigid habit has been able to effect.
When
we face this fact in its general significance, we confront one of the ominous
aspects of the history of man. We
realize how little the progress of man has been the product of intelligent
guidance, how largely it has been a by-product of accidental upheavals, even
though by an apologetic interest in behalf of some privileged institution we
later transmute chance into providence.
We have depended upon the clash of war, the stress of revolution, the
emergence of heroic individuals, the impact of migrations generated by war and
famine, the incoming of barbarians, to change established institutions. Instead of constantly utilizing unused
impulse to effect continuous reconstruction, we have waited till an
accumulation of stresses suddenly breaks through the dikes of custom.
It
is often supposed that as old persons die, so must old peoples. There are many facts in history to support
the belief. Decadence and degeneration
seems to be the rule as age increases.
An irruption of some uncivilized horde has then provided new blood and
fresh life—so much so that history has been defined as a a process of
rebarbarization. In truth the analogy
between a person and a nation with respect to senescence and death is
defective. A nation is always renewed by
death of its old constituents and the birth of those who are as young and fresh
as ever were any individuals in the hey-day of the nation’s glory. Not the nation but its customs get old. Its institutions petrify into rigidity; there
is social arterial sclerosis. Then some
people not overburdened with elaborate and stiff habits take up and carry on
the moving process of life. The stock of
fresh peoples is, however, approaching exhaustion. It is not safe to rely upon this expensive
method of renewing civilization. We need
to discover how to rejuvenate it from within.
A normal perpetuation becomes a fact in the degree in which impulse is
released and habit is plastic to the transforming touch of impulse. When customs are flexible and youth is
education as youth and not premature adulthood, no nation grows old.
.
. . . There are possibilities resident in the education of the young which have
never yet been taken advantage of. . . . [T]hus far schooling has been largely
utilized as a convenient tool of the existing nationalistic and economic
regimes. Hence it is easy to point out
defects and perversions in every existing school system. It is easy for a critic to ridicule the
religious devotion to education which has characterized for example the
American republic. It is easy to
represent it as a zeal without knowledge, fanatical faith apart from
understanding. And yet the cold fact of
the situation is that the chief means of continuous, graded, economical
improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing the opportunities of
educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire.