Such favorable results are, however, apt to be outweighed by the harm done when mere knowledge becomes the chief aim of ambition.
[36.] In order that instruction may act on the pupil’s ideas and disposition, every avenue of approach should be thrown open. The mere fact that we can never know with certainty, beforehand, what will influence the pupil most, warns us against [one-sidedness] of instruction.
Ideas spring from two main sources,—experience and social intercourse. Knowledge of nature—incomplete and crude—is derived from the former; the later furnishes the sentiments entertained toward our fellow-men, which, far from being praiseworthy, are on the contrary often very reprehensible. To improve these is the more urgent task; but neither ought we to neglect the knowledge of nature. If we do, we may expect error, fantastical notions, and eccentricities of every description.
[37.] Hence, we have two main branches of instruction,—the historical and the scientific. The former embraces not only history proper, but language study as well; the latter includes, besides natural science, mathematics.
“Historical” must be interpreted to include all human sciences, such as history, literature, languages, æsthetics, and political, economic, and social science. “Scientific” may include applied as well as pure science, and then we add all forms of industrial training to the curriculum. Other divisions of the subject-matter of instruction are often helpful. Thus one may speak of the human sciences, the natural sciences, and the economic sciences. The economic sciences include those activities where man and nature interact. Dr. Wm. T. Harris speaks of five coördinate groups of subjects, corresponding to what he calls the “five windows of the soul.”
[38.] Other reasons aside, the need alone of [counteracting] selfishness renders it necessary for every school that undertakes the education of the whole man to place human conditions and relations in the foreground of instruction. This humanistic aim should underlie the studies of the historical subjects, and only with reference to this aim may they be allowed to preponderate.
An interesting attempt to realize the aim here demanded is found in Professor John Dewey’s “School and Society,”[1] which is in effect a description of what he is working out in his practice or experimental school in connection with his department in the University of Chicago.
“If the aim of historical instruction is to enable the child to appreciate the values of social life, to see in imagination the forces which favor and let men’s effective coöperations with one another, to understand the sorts of character that help on and that hold back, the essential thing in its presentation is to make it moving, dynamic. History must be presented not as an accumulation of results or effects, a mere statement of what has happened, but as a forceful, acting thing. The motives, that is, the motors, must stand out. To study history is not to amass information, but to use information in constructing a vivid picture of how and why men did thus and so: achieved their successes and came to their failures.”[2]
Note.—This view does not shut out the other held in regard to Gymnasia, namely, that their business is to preserve and perpetuate a knowledge of classical antiquity; the latter aim must be made congruent with the former.