THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE

"We find in the child's spontaneous choice the nature of the
surroundings and of the activities he craves for; in other
words, he makes his own curriculum, and selects his own
subject matter."

The next problem we have to solve is how to unify the bewildering
variety of ideas and activities that a child seeks contact with during a
day. We found that the curriculum of the Infant School of to-day
presented a rather confusing variety of ideas, not necessarily arranged
as the children would have chosen; they would certainly not have chosen
to break off some intense interest, because an arbitrary timetable
hurried them to something else, and they would have been right. If we
asked the children their reasons for choosing, we would find no clue
except that they chose what they wanted to, neither could they tell us
why they spent so much more time over one thing than another. If a
similar study were to be made of a child from a slum also free to
arrange his day, we should find that while certain general features were
the same others would be different: he would ask for different stories,
probably play different games, or the same games in a different way, his
back-yard would present different aspects, the things he made would be
different.

It is evident that the old correlation method has little or nothing to
do with the matter; a child may or may not draw the rabbit he feeds, he
certainly does not play a rabbit game because of the rabbit he has fed,
nor does he build a rabbit-hutch with his bricks. He might try to make a
real one if the rabbit really needed it, but that arises out of an
obvious necessity. If he could put his unconscious promptings into
words, he would say he did the things because he wanted to, because
somebody else did them, or because of something he saw yesterday, and so
on; but he would always refer back to _himself_. The central link in
each case is in the child, with his special store of experiences derived
from his own particular surroundings; he brings to new experiences his
store of present experiences, his interests not always satisfied, his
powers variously used, he interprets the new by these, and seeks for
more in the line of the old. It is life he has experienced, and he seeks
for more life.

How then can we secure for him that the new experiences presented to him
in school will be in line with the old? We will take three typical cases
of c