that field. My professor of ethics used to say that "the good man who merely repeats his goodness of the day before is not a good man, but a bad man." The good teacher or the good physician or the good carpenter who merely repeat their goodness of the day before are not good but bad workmen. Why? Because every day is a new day with its new demands upon us, and we must grow in grace and likewise in knowledge in order to meet them. There is no form of knowledge so complete and final that it cannot be improved, no single human art so perfect that it cannot be made better, no form of human endeavor that does not call for further effort. For this philosophy, life is a perfecting, not an arriving at perfections, and the joy is in the process, not in reaching and remaining at a goal. CHAPTER V THE KINDS OF EDUCATION The only kind of education. If our analysis is correct the only kind of education that there is is self-education. It is not a thing of fixed subjects of instruction. No one study and no particular group of studies is indispensable. Neither is attendance at any particular kind of school, though the likelihood is a bit greater that if one has surrounded himself with inducements to study he will be a little more certain to study because of them than in their absence. It is a true saying, however, and worthy of general credence, that "many are exposed to an education but few take it.” Education is the process by which each individual out of his own awareness builds his world. No one can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, walk, or talk for the child. He must do all these things for himself. Just so, no one can image for him, remember for him, think for him, will for him. But human beings have been so busily engaged in doing these things before he came, and have so successfully recorded the experiences which they have had in doing them, that he seems to be surrounded by a world of ready-made existences and meanings which require no building up through constructive experience on his part, but only appropriation. Just what images are in the minds of those who advance the notion that education is appropriation it is hard to make out. Yet educators do sometimes talk as though they believed the child was freed from the necessity of learning to walk because the race has walked, or the necessity of seeing, handling, and experimenting with what the race has, out of such experience, learned to call objects because it has given them names, or by trial and error to find out how to conduct himself because the race has already learned by experimenting how to conduct itself. This conception of education views it as a body of results to be imparted without going through the processes which lead to them. Whenever education is conceived in that fashion, an impossible task is undertaken, and an outcome of no profit but of positive harm, both to the learner and to society which attempts to teach him thus, is inevitable. The nature of our social inheritance. Must each learner then begin at the very beginning just as the race did and rediscover all that it has discovered for himself? Is it of no advantage to him to be born late in the course of civilization? Shall he not profit by what has already been found out? Certainly he will profit and profit greatly, yet not by appropriating results merely but by appropriating results through their processes. Our social inheritance is an inheritance of methods. The wise invite us not to see with their eyes or to think with their minds, but to look with our own eyes and to think with our own minds upon those matters of great concern to men with which they busied themselves and in their experimenting found profitable ways of treating them, standpoints of advantage, and methods which may lead to control. Professor Baldwin has made a distinction of first-rate importance in designating the world which we are born into as our social inheritance. To be born into a German family does not mean that one brings with him a structural tendency to learn the German language, but it does mean that he inherits an environment in which he must learn to communicate in German. His situation provides a particular form of activity for his mind to work in. German does not come to him without his laying hold of it word by word and sentence by sentence. He is the inheritor of a way of speaking. He cannot well escape communicating with those about him in the words which they use, but to do so he must reinvent the language because of their occasioning him to do so. He inherits the race's knowledge in the same way. It is to him but a language which he must learn to use if he would communicate with his fellow men and have their help in living. It comes to him not as a fixed body of ready-made truth which he can take without creating. It is only an occasion, an opportunity, and, to an extent, a necessity for his own mental activity. His mother spoke in German, and showed him the way and put him under the necessity of developing a system of meanings for her sound symbols and of himself using a similar system of sounds. Instruction in language, literature, science, history, or philosophy can do nothing more; they are simply invitations to him to perfect his own awareness, suggestions as to problems that the race has met in its course and which he will most likely meet in his, and intimations of ways in which he will find it profitable to attack them. He may learn this language of the sciences just as he may learn German with degrees of mastery. He may be able to repeat its words without feeling their meanings. He may be able to read it without being able to write it, or to understand it without uttering it. He may collect a great store of curious and interesting facts about it and not be able to use it, or he be able to think in it and to speak it. But the prime fact about the language is that it was made to think by and to speak with, and this is the prime fact about all forms of human learning. may |