ustment.

The fundamental factors in the educative process are an immature,
undeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate
in the matured experience of the adult. The educative process is the due
interaction of these forces. Such a conception of each in relation to
the other as facilitates completest and freest interaction is the
essence of educational theory.

But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see the conditions
in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other,
to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality to which each
belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon something in the nature of the
child, or upon something in the developed consciousness of the adult,
and insist upon _that_ as the key to the whole problem. When this
happens a really serious practical problem--that of interaction--is
transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem.
Instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see
conflicting terms. We get the case of the child _vs._ the curriculum; of
the individual nature _vs._ social culture. Below all other divisions in
pedagogic opinion lies this opposition.

The child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personal contacts. Things
hardly come within his experience unless they touch, intimately and
obviously, his own well-being, or that of his family and friends. His
world is a world of persons with their personal interests, rather than
a realm of facts and laws. Not truth, in the sense of conformity to
external fact, but affection and sympathy, is its keynote. As against
this, the course of study met in the school presents material stretching
back indefinitely in time, and extending outward indefinitely into
space. The child is taken out of his familiar physical environment,
hardly more than a square mile or so in area, into the wide world--yes,
and even to the bounds of the solar system. His little span of personal
memory and tradition is overlaid with the long centuries of the history
of all peoples.

Again, the child's life is an integral, a total one. He passes quickly
and readily from one topic to another, as from one spot to another,
but is not conscious of transition or break. There is no conscious
isolation, hardly conscious distinction. The things that occupy him are
held together by the unity of the personal and social interests which
his life carries along. Whatever is uppermost in his m