CONTENTS
[ Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life ]
[ Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. ]
[ Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function ]
[ Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes ]
[ Chapter Three: Education as Direction ]
[ Summary. The natural or native impulses of the young do not agree ]
[ Chapter Four: Education as Growth ]
[ Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. ]
[ Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline ]
[ Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process ]
[ Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive ]
[ Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively ]
[ Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education ]
[ Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds ]
[ Chapter Eight: Aims in Education ]
[ Summary. An aim denotes the result of any natural process ]
[ Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims ]
[ Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying ]
[ Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline ]
[ Summary. Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity ]
[ Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking ]
[ Summary. In determining the place of thinking ]
[ Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education ]
[ Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree ]
[ Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method ]
[ Summary. Method is a statement of the way the subject matter ]
[ Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter ]
[ Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily ]
[ Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum ]
[ Summary. In the previous chapter we found that the primary subject ]
[ Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History ]
[ Summary. It is the nature of an experience to have implications ]
[ Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study ]
[ Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors ]
[ Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values ]
[ Summary. Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value ]
[ Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure ]
[ Summary. Of the segregations of educational values ]
[ Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies ]
[ Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize ]
[ Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism ]
[ Summary. The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected ]
[ Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World ]
[ Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip ]
[ Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education ]
[ Summary. A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity ]
[ Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education ]
[ Summary. After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues ]
[ Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge ]
[ Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full ]
[ Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals ]
[ Summary. The most important problem of moral education in the school ]
Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.
As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely. After a while they succumb; they die. The creature is not equal to the task of indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life process is not dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one individual. Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous sequence. And though, as the geological record shows, not merely individuals but also species die out, the life process continues in increasingly complex forms. As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.