; it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the
child war with each other.

If such be the case, the problem of the relation of the child and the
curriculum presents itself in this guise: Of what use, educationally
speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning? How does
it assist us in dealing with the early stages of growth to be able to
anticipate its later phases? The studies, as we have agreed, represent
the possibilities of development inherent in the child's immediate crude
experience. But, after all, they are not parts of that present and
immediate life. Why, then, or how, make account of them?

Asking such a question suggests its own answer. To see the outcome is
to know in what direction the present experience is moving, provided
it move normally and soundly. The far-away point, which is of no
significance to us simply as far away, becomes of huge importance the
moment we take it as defining a present direction of movement. Taken
in this way it is no remote and distant result to be achieved, but a
guiding method in dealing with the present. The systematized and defined
experience of the adult mind, in other words, is of value to us in
interpreting the child's life as it immediately shows itself, and in
passing on to guidance or direction.

Let us look for a moment at these two ideas: interpretation and
guidance. The child's present experience is in no way self-explanatory.
It is not final, but transitional. It is nothing complete in itself, but
just a sign or index of certain growth-tendencies. As long as we confine
our gaze to what the child here and now puts forth, we are confused and
misled. We cannot read its meaning. Extreme depreciations of the child
morally and intellectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have
their root in a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a
growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails
to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by
themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see
that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs,
and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they are treated as
achievements.

What we need is something which will enable us to interpret, to
appraise, the elements in the child's present puttings forth and
fallings away, his exhibitions of power and weakness, in the light of
some larger growth-process in which they have their