May 6, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



691 



mention of all sorts implies vivid self -con- 

 sciousness. It is evident that advantage 

 would foUow from making the conscious- 

 ness of self or selves which is the life of the 

 child's play — on its competition or co- 

 operation—have as essential a place in in- 

 struction. To use Professor Dewey's 

 phrase, instruction should be an interchange 

 of experience in which the child brings his 

 experience to be interpreted by the experi- 

 ence of the parent or teacher. This recog- 

 nizes that education is interchange of 

 ideas, is convei'sation— belongs to a uni- 

 verse of discourse. If the lesson is simply 

 set for the child— is not his own problem — 

 the recognition of himself as facing a task 

 and a task-master is no part of the solu- 

 tion of the problem. But a difSculty which 

 the child feels and brings to his parent or 

 teacher for solution is helped on toward 

 interpretation by the consciousness of the 

 child's relation to his pastors and masters. 

 Just in so far as the subject matter of in- 

 struction can be brought into the form of 

 problems arising in the experience of the 

 child— just so far will the relation of the 

 child to the instructor become a part of 

 the natural solution of the problem— ac- 

 tual success of a teacher depends in large 

 measure upon this capacity to state the 

 subject matter of instruction in terms of 

 the experience of the children. The recog- 

 nition of the value of industrial and voca- 

 tional training comes back at once to this, 

 that what the child has to learn is what he 

 wants to acquire, to become the man. 

 Under these conditions instruction takes 

 on frankly the form of conversation, as 

 much sought by the pupil as the instructor. 

 I take it therefore to be a scientific task 

 to which education should set itself that of 

 making the subject matter of its instruc- 

 tion the material of personal intercourse 

 between pupils and instructors, and be- 

 tween the children themselves. The sub- 



stitution of the converse of concrete indi- 

 viduals for the pale abstractions of thought. 



To a large extent our school organiza- 

 tion reserves the use of the personal rela- 

 tion between teacher and taught for the 

 negative side, for the prohibitions. The 

 lack of interest in the personal content of 

 the lesson is in fact startling when one 

 considers that it is the personal form in 

 which the instruction should be given. 

 The best illustration of this lack of interest 

 we find in the problems which disgrace 

 our arithmetics. They are supposed mat- 

 ters of converse, but their content is so 

 bare, their abstractions so raggedly cov- 

 ered with the form of questions about such 

 marketing and shopping and building as 

 never were on sea or land, that one sees that 

 the social form of instruction is a form only 

 for the writer of the arithmetic. When 

 further we consider how utterly inadequate 

 the teaching force of our public schools is to 

 transform this matter into concrete experi- 

 ence of the children or even into their own 

 experience, the hopelessness of the situa- 

 tion is overwhelming. Ostwald has written 

 a text-book of chemistry for the secondary 

 school which has done what every text- 

 book should do. It is not only that the 

 material shows real respect for the intelli- 

 gence of the student, but it is so organized 

 that the development of the subject matter 

 is in reality the action and reaction of one 

 mind upon another mind. The dictum of 

 the Platonic Socrates, that one must follow 

 the argument where it leads in the dia- 

 logue, should be the motto of the writer of 

 text-books. 



It has been indicated already that lan- 

 guage being essentially social in its nature 

 thinking with the child is rendered con- 

 crete by taking on the form of conversa- 

 tion. It has been also indicated that this 

 can take place only when the thought has 

 reference to a real problem in the expert- 



