ily
related to each other in the educative process, since this is precisely
one of interaction and adjustment.

What, then, is the problem? It is just to get rid of the prejudicial
notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct from degree) between
the child's experience and the various forms of subject-matter that make
up the course of study. From the side of the child, it is a question of
seeing how his experience already contains within itself elements--facts
and truths--of just the same sort as those entering into the formulated
study; and, what is of more importance, of how it contains within itself
the attitudes, the motives, and the interests which have operated in
developing and organizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now
occupies. From the side of the studies, it is a question of interpreting
them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child's life, and of
discovering the steps that intervene between the child's present
experience and their richer maturity.

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made
in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's
experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent,
embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are
simply two limits which define a single process. Just as two points
define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the
facts and truths of studies define instruction. It is continuous
reconstruction, moving from the child's present experience out into that
represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies.

On the face of it, the various studies, arithmetic, geography, language,
botany, etc., are themselves experience--they are that of the race. They
embody the cumulative outcome of the efforts, the strivings, and the
successes of the human race generation after generation. They present
this, not as a mere accumulation, not as a miscellaneous heap of
separate bits of experience, but in some organized and systematized
way--that is, as reflectively formulated.

Hence, the facts and truths that enter into the child's present
experience, and those contained in the subject-matter of studies, are
the initial and final terms of one reality. To oppose one to the other
is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it is to
set the moving tendency and the final result of the same process over
against each other