cipate more
fully in the life about him. Through the subjects of the school
curriculum, therefore, the child may acquire much useful knowledge which
would not otherwise be met, and much which, if met in ordinary life,
could not be apprehended to an equal degree.

DANGERS IN USE OF CURRICULUM

While recognizing the educational value of the school curriculum, it
should be noticed that certain dangers attach to its use as a means of
providing problems for developing the experiences of the child. It is
frequently argued against the school that the experiences gained therein
too often prove of little value to the child in the affairs of practical
life. The world of knowledge within the school, it is claimed, is so
different from the world of action outside the school, that the pupil
can find no connection between them. If, however, as claimed above, the
value of experience consists in its use as a means of efficient control
of conduct, it is evident that the experiences acquired through the
school should find direct application in the affairs of life, or in
other words, the school should influence the conduct, or behaviour, of
the child both within and without the school.

=A. Child may not see Connection with Life.=--Now the school curriculum,
as has been seen, in representing the actual social life, so classifies
and simplifies this life that only one type of experience--number,
language, chemistry, geography, etc., is presented to the child at one
time. It is evident, however, that when the child faces the problems of
actual life, they will not appear in the simple form in which he meets
them as represented in the school curriculum. Thus, when he leaves the
school and enters society, he frequently sees no connection between the
complex social life outside the school and the simplified and
systematized representation of that life, as previously met in the
school studies. For example, when the boy, after leaving school, is set
to fill an order in a wholesale drug store, he will in the one
experience be compelled to use various phases of his chemical,
arithmetical, writing, and bookkeeping knowledge, and that perhaps in
the midst of a mass of other accidental impressions. In like manner, the
girl in her home cooking might meet in a single experience a situation
requiring mathematical, chemical, and physical knowledge for its
successful adjustment, as in the substitution of soda and cream of
tartar for baking-powder. Thi