technically, that
ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is
supposed to afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation
of the past. Cultural recapitulation says, first, that children at a
certain age are in the mental and moral condition of savagery; their
instincts are vagrant and predatory because their ancestors at one time
lived such a life. Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject
matter of their education at this time is the material--especially the
literary material of myths, folk-tale, and song--produced by humanity
in the analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something
corresponding, say, to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time
when he is ready to take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the
present epoch of culture.

In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had
little currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education
is essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past
and especially to the literary products of the past, and that mind
is adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the
spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense influence
upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth examination in its
extreme formulation.

In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic growth
of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of
lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of
past stages. If there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary
development would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation
would simply have repeated its predecessors' existence. Development, in
short, has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in
the prior scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education
is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. The great advantage of
immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate
the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. The business of
education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and retraversing
the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The social
environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action
of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. To ignore the
directive influence of th