Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner. So far as the
nature of subject matter in principle is concerned, there is
nothing to add to what has been said (See ante, p. 134). It
consists of the facts observed, recalled, read, and talked about,
and the ideas suggested, in course of a development of a
situation having a purpose. This statement needs to be rendered
more specific by connecting it with the materials of school
instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is
the significance of our definition in application to reading,
writing, mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing,
physics, chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on?
Let us recur to two of the points made earlier in our discussion.
The educator's part in the enterprise of education is to furnish
the environment which stimulates responses and directs the
learner's course. In last analysis, all that the educator can do
is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible
result in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional
dispositions. Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying
an environment. The other point is the necessity of a social
environment to give meaning to habits formed. In what we have
termed informal education, subject matter is carried directly in
the matrix of social intercourse. It is what the persons with
whom an individual associates do and say. This fact gives a clew
to the understanding of the subject matter of formal or
deliberate instruction. A connecting link is found in the
stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
doings and rites of a primitive social group. They represent the
stock of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous
experience, which are so prized by the group as to be identified
with their conception of their own collective life. Not being
obviously a part of the skill exhibited in the daily occupations
of eating, hunting, making war and peace, constructing rugs,
pottery, and baskets, etc., they are consciously impressed upon
the young; often, as in the initiation ceremonies, with intense
emotional fervor. Even more pains are consciously taken to
perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal formulae of the
group than to transmit the directly useful customs of the group
just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in
the ordinary processes of association.
As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater
number of acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or
in the belief of the group, upon standard ideas deposited from
past experience, the content of social life gets more definitely
formulated for purposes of instruction. As we have previously
noted, probably the chief motive for consciously dwelling upon
the group life, extracting the meanings which are regarded as
most important and systematizing them in a coherent arrangement,
is just the need of instructing the young so as to perpetuate
group life. Once started on this road of selection, formulation,
and organization, no definite limit exists. The invention of
writing and of printing gives the operation an immense impetus.
Finally, the bonds which connect the subject matter of school
study with the habits and ideals of the social group are
disguised and covered up. The ties are so loosened that it often
appears as if there were none; as if subject matter existed
simply as knowledge on its own independent behoof, and as if
study were the mere act of mastering it for its own sake,
irrespective of any social values. Since it is highly important
for practical reasons to counter-act this tendency (See ante, p.
8) the chief purposes of our theoretical discussion are to make
clear the connection which is so readily lost from sight, and to
show in some detail the social content and function of the chief
constituents of the course of study.
The points need to be considered from the standpoint of
instructor and of student. To the former, the significance of a
knowledge of subject matter, going far beyond the present
knowledge of pupils, is to supply definite standards and to
reveal to him the possibilities of the crude activities of the
immature. (i) The material of school studies translates into
concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current social life
which it is desirable to transmit. It puts clearly before the
instructor the essential ingredients of the culture to be
perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect him from the
haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the
meanings had not been standardized. (ii) A knowledge of the
ideas which have been achieved in the past as the outcome of
activity places the educator in a position to perceive the
meaning of the seeming impulsive and aimless reactions of the
young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them so that
they will amount to something. The more the educator knows of
music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate
musical impulses of a child. Organized subject matter represents
the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences
involving the same world, and powers and needs similar to theirs.
It does not represent perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is
the best at command to further new experiences which may, in some
respects at least, surpass the achievements embodied in existing
knowledge and works of art.
From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various
studies represent working resources, available capital. Their
remoteness from the experience of the young is not, however,
seeming; it is real. The subject matter of the learner is not,
therefore, it cannot be, identical with the formulated, the
crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult; the
material as found in books and in works of art, etc. The latter
represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing
state. It enters directly into the activities of the expert and
the educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner.
Failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter from the
respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for
most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other
expressions of preexistent knowledge.
The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in
the concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's
attitude to subject matter is so different from that of the
pupil. The teacher presents in actuality what the pupil
represents only in posse. That is, the teacher already knows the
things which the student is only learning. Hence the problem of
the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the direct act of
teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter at his
fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and
response of the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay
with subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind,
naturally, should be not on itself but on the topic in hand. Or
to state the same point in a somewhat different manner: the
teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but
in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and capacities.
Hence simple scholarship is not enough. In fact, there are
certain features of scholarship or mastered subject matter --
taken by itself -- which get in the way of effective teaching
unless the instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with
its interplay in the pupil's own experience. In the first place,
his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the range of the
pupil's acquaintance. It involves principles which are beyond
the immature pupil's understanding and interest. In and of
itself, it may no more represent the living world of the pupil's
experience than the astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents a
baby's acquaintance with the room in which he stays. In the
second place, the method of organization of the material of
achieved scholarship differs from that of the beginner. It is
not true that the experience of the young is unorganized -- that
it consists of isolated scraps. But it is organized in
connection with direct practical centers of interest. The
child's home is, for example, the organizing center of his
geographical knowledge. His own movements about the locality,
his journeys abroad, the tales of his friends, give the ties
which hold his items of information together. But the geography
of the geographer, of the one who has already developed the
implications of these smaller experiences, is organized on the
basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to one
another -- not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily
movements, and friends. To the one who is learned, subject
matter is extensive, accurately defined, and logically
interrelated. To the one who is learning, it is fluid, partial,
and connected through his personal occupations. 1 The problem of
teaching is to keep the experience of the student moving in the
direction of what the expert already knows. Hence the need that
the teacher know both subject matter and the characteristic needs
and capacities of the student.
2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is
possible, without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three
fairly typical stages in the growth of subject matter in the
experience of the learner. In its first estate, knowledge exists
as the content of intelligent ability -- power to do. This kind
of subject matter, or known material, is expressed in familiarity
or acquaintance with things. Then this material gradually is
surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or
information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into
rationally or logically organized material -- that of the one
who, relatively speaking, is expert in the subject.
I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains
most deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk,
talk, read, write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine,
calculate, drive a horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on
indefinitely. The popular tendency to regard instinctive acts
which are adapted to an end as a sort of miraculous knowledge,
while unjustifiable, is evidence of the strong tendency to
identify intelligent control of the means of action with
knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic
conception of knowledge which ignores everything but
scientifically formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize
that primary or initial subject matter always exists as matter of
an active doing, involving the use of the body and the handling
of material, the subject matter of instruction is isolated from
the needs and purposes of the learner, and so becomes just a
something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
Recognition of the natural course of development, on the
contrary, always sets out with situations which involve learning
by doing. Arts and occupations form the initial stage of the
curriculum, corresponding as they do to knowing how to go about
the accomplishment of ends. Popular terms denoting knowledge
have always retained the connection with ability in action lost
by academic philosophies. Ken and can are allied words.
Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
affection and of looking out for its welfare. Mind means
carrying out instructions in action -- as a child minds his
mother -- and taking care of something -- as a nurse minds the
baby. To be thoughtful, considerate, means to heed the claims of
others. Apprehension means dread of undesirable consequences, as
well as intellectual grasp. To have good sense or judgment is to
know the conduct a situation calls for; discernment is not making
distinctions for the sake of making them, an exercise reprobated
as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair with reference
to acting. Wisdom has never lost its association with the proper
direction of life. Only in education, never in the life of
farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter,
does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from
doing. Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in
acquaintance or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted
with are the things we put to frequent use -- such things as
chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes, food, knives and forks on
the commonplace level, differentiating into more special objects
according to a person's occupations in life. Knowledge of things
in that intimate and emotional sense suggested by the word
acquaintance is a precipitate from our employing them with a
purpose. We have acted with or upon the thing so frequently that
we can anticipate how it will act and react -- such is the
meaning of familiar acquaintance. We are ready for a familiar
thing; it does not catch us napping, or play unexpected tricks
with us. This attitude carries with it a sense of congeniality
or friendliness, of ease and illumination; while the things with
which we are not accustomed to deal are strange, foreign, cold,
remote, "abstract."
II. But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this
primary stage of knowledge will darken understanding. It
includes practically all of our knowledge which is not the result
of deliberate technical
study. Modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons
as well as things. Impulses of communication and habits of
intercourse have to be adapted to maintaining successful
connections with others; a large fund of social knowledge
accrues. As a part of this intercommunication one learns much
from others. They tell of their experiences and of the
experiences which, in turn, have been told them. In so far as
one is interested or concerned in these communications, their
matter becomes a part of one's own experience. Active
connections with others are such an intimate and vital part of
our own concerns that it is impossible to draw sharp lines, such
as would enable us to say, "Here my experience ends; there yours
begins." In so far as we are partners in common undertakings, the
things which others communicate to us as the consequences of
their particular share in the enterprise blend at once into the
experience resulting from our own special doings. The ear is as
much an organ of experience as the eye or hand; the eye is
available for reading reports of what happens beyond its horizon.
Things remote in space and time affect the issue of our actions
quite as much as things which we can smell and handle. They
really concern us, and, consequently, any account of them which
assists us in dealing with things at hand falls within personal
experience.
Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject
matter. The place of communication in personal doing supplies us
with a criterion for estimating the value of informational
material in school. Does it grow naturally out of some question
with which the student is concerned? Does it fit into his more
direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy and deepen its
meaning? If it meets these two requirements, it is educative.
The amount heard or read is of no importance--the more the
better, provided the student has a need for it and can apply it
in some situation of his own.
But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual
practice as it is to lay them down in theory. The extension in
modern times of the area of intercommunication; the invention of
appliances for securing acquaintance with remote parts of the
heavens and bygone events of history; the cheapening of devices,
like printing, for recording and distributing information --
genuine and alleged -- have created an immense bulk of
communicated subject matter. It is much easier to swamp a pupil
with this than to work it into his direct experiences. All too
frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the
world of personal acquaintance. The sole problem of the student
is to learn, for school purposes, for purposes of recitations and
promotions, the constituent parts of this strange world.
Probably the most conspicuous connotation of the word knowledge
for most persons to-day is just the body of facts and truths
ascertained by others; the material found in the rows and rows of
atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel,
scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously
influenced men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The
statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of
active concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be
themselves knowledge. The record of knowledge, independent of
its place as an outcome of inquiry and a resource in further
inquiry, is taken to be knowledge. The mind of man is taken
captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the
weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown,
are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.
If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating
information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers,
it is not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated
instruction. The "course of study" consists largely of
information distributed into various branches of study, each
study being subdivided into lessons presenting in serial cutoff
portions of the total store. In the seventeenth century, the
store was still small enough so that men set up the ideal of a
complete encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky that the
impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it all
is obvious. But the educational ideal has not been much
affected. Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch
of learning, or at least in a selected group, remains the
principle by which the curriculum, from elementary school through
college, is formed; the easier portions being assigned to the
earlier years, the more difficult to the later. The complaints
of educators that learning does not enter into character and
affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work, against
cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts, " against
devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and
principles, all follow from this state of affairs. Knowledge
which is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to
become merely verbal. It is no objection to information that it
is clothed in words; communication necessarily takes place
through words. But in the degree in which what is communicated
cannot be organized into the existing experience of the learner,
it becomes mere words: that is, pure sense-stimuli, lacking in
meaning. Then it operates to call out mechanical reactions,
ability to use the vocal organs to repeat statements, or the hand
to write or to do "sums."
To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the
subject matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem,
and for giving added significance to the search for solution and
to the solution itself. Informational knowledge is the material
which can be fallen back upon as given, settled, established,
assured in a doubtful situation. It is a kind of bridge for mind
in its passage from doubt to discovery. It has the office of an
intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in available
form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as an
agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is
told that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the
year is three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the
ratio of the diameter of the circle to its circumference is
3.1415 . . . one receives what is indeed knowledge for others,
but for him it is a stimulus to knowing. His acquisition of
knowledge depends upon his response to what is communicated.
3. Science or Rationalized Knowledge. Science is a name for
knowledge in its most characteristic form. It represents in its
degree, the perfected outcome of learning, -- its consummation.
What is known, in a given case, is what is sure, certain,
settled, disposed of; that which we think with rather than that
which we think about. In its honorable sense, knowledge is
distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and
not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that
there is difference between intellectual certainty of subject
matter and our certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief;
credulity is natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to
suspense and intellectual hesitation; it is prone to assertion.
It likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats them as such
without due warrant. Familiarity, common repute, and
congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth.
Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error, -- a
greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is
thus led to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the
beginning of effective love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say
that science is born of doubting.
We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data,
and ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in
themselves they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection
for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended
judgment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the
process of testing. We are satisfied with superficial and
immediate shortvisioned applications. If these work out with
moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose that our
assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure, we
are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and
incorrectness of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck
and the hostility of circumstance. We charge the evil
consequence not to the error of our schemes and our incomplete
inquiry into conditions (thereby getting material for revising
the former and stimulus for extending the latter) but to untoward
fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in clinging to
our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
Science represents the safeguard of the race against these
natural propensities and the evils which flow from them. It
consists of the special appliances and methods which the race has
slowly worked out in order to conduct reflection under conditions
whereby its procedures and results are tested. It is artificial
(an acquired art), not spontaneous; learned, not native. To this
fact is due the unique, the invaluable place of science in
education, and also the dangers which threaten its right use.
Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in
possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised
for effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely
conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best
instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of
knowledge. For he does not become acquainted with the traits
that mark off opinion and assent from authorized conviction. On
the other hand, the fact that science marks the perfecting of
knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique renders its
results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary experience --
a quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the term
abstract. When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific
information is even more exposed to the dangers attendant upon
presenting ready-made subject matter than are other forms of
information.
Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and
testing. At first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the
current conception that science is organized or systematized
knowledge. The opposition, however, is only seeming, and
disappears when the ordinary definition is completed. Not
organization but the kind of organization effected by adequate
methods of tested discovery marks off science. The knowledge of
a farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent.
It is organized on the basis of relation of means to ends --
practically organized. Its organization as knowledge (that is,
in the eulogistic sense of adequately tested and confirmed) is
incidental to its organization with reference to securing crops,
live-stock, etc. But scientific subject matter is
organized with specific reference to the successful conduct of
the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a specialized
undertaking. Reference to the kind of assurance attending
science will shed light upon this statement. It is rational
assurance, -- logical warranty. The ideal of scientific
organization is, therefore, that every conception and statement
shall be of such a kind as to follow from others and to lead to
others. Conceptions and propositions mutually imply and support
one another. This double relation of 'leading to and confirming"
is what is meant by the terms logical and rational. The everyday
conception of water is more available for ordinary uses of
drinking, washing, irrigation, etc., than the chemist's notion of
it. The latter's description of it as H20 is superior from the
standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states the nature of
water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other things,
indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is arrived
at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the
structure of things. Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the
objective relations of water any more than does a statement that
water is transparent, fluid, without taste or odor, satisfying to
thirst, etc. It is just as true that water has these relations
as that it is constituted by two molecules of hydrogen in
combination with one of oxygen. But for the particular purpose
of conducting discovery with a view to ascertainment of fact, the
latter relations are fundamental. The more one emphasizes
organization as a mark of science, then, the more he is committed
to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition of
science. For method defines the kind of organization in virtue
of which science is science.
4. Subject Matter as Social. Our next chapters will take up
various school activities and studies and discuss them as
successive stages in that evolution of knowledge which we have
just been discussing. It remains to say a few words upon subject
matter as social, since our prior remarks have been mainly
concerned with its intellectual aspect. A difference in breadth
and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even in the data and
ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are motivated
by purposes. For there is a difference in the social scope of
purposes and the social importance of problems. With the wide
range of possible material to select from, it is important that
education (especially in all its phases short of the most
specialized) should use a criterion of social worth. All
information and systematized scientific subject matter have been
worked out under the conditions of social life and have been
transmitted by social means. But this does not prove that all is
of equal value for the purposes of forming the disposition and
supplying the equipment of members of present society. The
scheme of a curriculum must take account of the adaptation of
studies to the needs of the existing community life; it must
select with the intention of improving the life we live in common
so that the future shall be better than the past. Moreover, the
curriculum must be planned with reference to placing essentials
first, and refinements second. The things which are socially
most fundamental, that is, which have to do with the experiences
in which the widest groups share, are the essentials. The things
which represent the needs of specialized groups and technical
pursuits are secondary. There is truth in the saying that
education must first be human and only after that professional.
But those who utter the saying frequently have in mind in the
term human only a highly specialized class: the class of learned
men who preserve the classic traditions of the past. They forget
that material is humanized in the degree in which it connects
with the common interests of men as men. Democratic society is
peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the use in forming
a course of study of criteria which are broadly human. Democracy
cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject
matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for
the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the
traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that
the "essentials" of elementary education are the three R's
mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials
needed for realization of democratic ideals. Unconsciously it
assumes that these ideals are unrealizable; it assumes that in
the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood, "making a
living," must signify for most men and women doing things which
are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who do
them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged
in them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of
pecuniary reward. For preparation of large numbers for a life of
this sort, and only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency
in reading, writing, spelling and figuring, together with
attainment of a certain amount of muscular dexterity,
"essentials." Such conditions also infect the education called
liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat parasitic
cultivation bought at the expense of not having the enlightenment
and discipline which come from concern with the deepest problems
of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social
responsibilities of education must present situations where
problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and
where observation and information are calculated to develop
social insight and interest.
Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of
the meanings which supply content to existing social life. The
continuity of social life means that many of these meanings are
contributed to present activity by past collective experience.
As social life grows more complex, these factors increase in
number and import. There is need of special selection,
formulation, and organization in order that they may be
adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very
process tends to set up subject matter as something of value just
by itself, apart from its function in promoting the realization
of the meanings implied in the present experience of the
immature. Especially is the educator exposed to the temptation
to conceive his task in terms of the pupil's ability to
appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set statements,
irrespective of its organization into his activities as a
developing social member. The positive principle is maintained
when the young begin with active occupations having a social
origin and use, and proceed to a scientific insight in the
materials and laws involved, through assimilating into their more
direct experience the ideas and facts communicated by others who
have had a larger experience. 1 Since the learned man should
also still be a learner, it will be understood that these
contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier stages
of learning at least they are practically all-important.
Deep link provided by Citebite
![[Previous]](/library/img/button-previous-cold.gif){kind=small}
![[Contents]](/library/img/button-contents-hot.gif){kind=small}
![[Next]](/library/img/button-next-cold.gif){kind=small}