ing its own law which can be
fulfilled only when adequate and normal conditions are provided. Really
to interpret the child's present crude impulses in counting, measuring,
and arranging things in rhythmic series involves mathematical
scholarship--a knowledge of the mathematical formulae and relations
which have, in the history of the race, grown out of just such crude
beginnings. To see the whole history of development which intervenes
between these two terms is simply to see what step the child needs to
take just here and now; to what use he needs to put his blind impulse in
order that it may get clarity and gain force.

If, once more, the "old education" tended to ignore the dynamic quality,
the developing force inherent in the child's present experience, and
therefore to assume that direction and control were just matters of
arbitrarily putting the child in a given path and compelling him to
walk there, the "new education" is in danger of taking the idea of
development in altogether too formal and empty a way. The child is
expected to "develop" this or that fact or truth out of his own mind. He
is told to think things out, or work things out for himself, without
being supplied any of the environing conditions which are requisite to
start and guide thought. Nothing can be developed from nothing; nothing
but the crude can be developed out of the crude--and this is what surely
happens when we throw the child back upon his achieved self as a
finality, and invite him to spin new truths of nature or of conduct
out of that. It is certainly as futile to expect a child to evolve a
universe out of his own mere mind as it is for a philosopher to attempt
that task. Development does not mean just getting something out of the
mind. It is a development of experience and into experience that is
really wanted. And this is impossible save as just that educative medium
is provided which will enable the powers and interests that have been
selected as valuable to function. They must operate, and how they
operate will depend almost entirely upon the stimuli which surround
them and the material upon which they exercise themselves. The problem
of direction is thus the problem of selecting appropriate stimuli for
instincts and impulses which it is desired to employ in the gaining
of new experience. What new experiences are desirable, and thus what
stimuli are needed, it is impossible to tell except as there is some
comprehension of the deve