Dewey; Democracy and Education

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exploration. The variety of peoples and environments, their
contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation.
The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary. And while
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Democracy and Education
161
local or home geography is the natural starting point in the
reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an
intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not
an end in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at the
large world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as
deadly as do object lessons which simply summarize the properties
of familiar objects. The reason is the same. The imagination is
not fed, but is held down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and
refining what is already known. But when the familiar fences
that mark the limits of the village proprietors are signs that
introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great nations,
even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air, running
water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil
officers and their duties -- all these things are found in the
local environment. Treated as if their meaning began and ended
in those confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously
learned. As instruments for extending the limits of experience,
bringing within its scope peoples and things otherwise strange
and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which they are
put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations come
from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their course is
to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional
information, but by remaking the meaning of what was previously a
matter of course.
The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of
geographical study which tend to become specialized and separate.
Mathematical or astronomical, physiographic, topographic,
political, commercial, geography, all make their claims. How are
they to be adjusted? By an external compromise that crowds in so
much of each? No other method is to be found unless it be
constantly borne in mind that the educational center of gravity
is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject. From this
center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is needed
to help appreciate the significance of human activities and
relations. The differences of civilization in cold and tropical
regions, the special inventions, industrial and political, of
peoples in the temperate regions, cannot be understood without
appeal to the earth as a member of the solar system. Economic
activities deeply influence social intercourse and political
organization on one side, and reflect physical conditions on the
other. The specializations of these topics are for the
specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose
experience is social.
To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced;
verbally, it is. But in educational idea there is but one
reality, and it is pity that in practice we have two names: for
the diversity of names tends to conceal the identity of meaning.
Nature and the earth should be equivalent terms, and so should
earth study and nature study. Everybody knows that nature study
has suffered in schools from scrappiness of subject matter, due
to dealing with a large number of isolated points. The parts of
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Democracy and Education
162
a flower have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as
an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from
the soil, air, and light in which and through which it lives.
The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention
is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed
imagination. The lack of interest is so great that it was
seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural facts and
events with myths in order that they might attract and hold the
mind. In numberless cases, more or less silly personifications
were resorted to. The method was silly, but it expressed a real
need for a human atmosphere. The facts had been torn to pieces
by being taken out of their context. They no longer belonged to
the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere. To compensate,
recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations. The
real remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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