heoretical one. We are practically threatened on all sides. Textbook
and teacher vie with each other in presenting to the child the
subject-matter as it stands to the specialist. Such modification and
revision as it undergoes are a mere elimination of certain scientific
difficulties, and the general reduction to a lower intellectual level.
The material is not translated into life-terms, but is directly offered
as a substitute for, or an external annex to, the child's present life.

Three typical evils result: In the first place, the lack of any organic
connection with what the child has already seen and felt and loved makes
the material purely formal and symbolic. There is a sense in which it is
impossible to value too highly the formal and the symbolic. The genuine
form, the real symbol, serve as methods in the holding and discovery of
truth. They are tools by which the individual pushes out most surely and
widely into unexplored areas. They are means by which he brings to bear
whatever of reality he has succeeded in gaining in past searchings. But
this happens only when the symbol really symbolizes--when it stands for
and sums up in shorthand actual experiences which the individual has
already gone through. A symbol which is induced from without, which has
not been led up to in preliminary activities, is, as we say, a _bare_
or _mere_ symbol; it is dead and barren. Now, any fact, whether of
arithmetic, or geography, or grammar, which is not led up to and into
out of something which has previously occupied a significant position
in the child's life for its own sake, is forced into this position.
It is not a reality, but just the sign of a reality which _might_ be
experienced if certain conditions were fulfilled. But the abrupt
presentation of the fact as something known by others, and requiring
only to be studied and learned by the child, rules out such conditions
of fulfilment. It condemns the fact to be a hieroglyph: it would mean
something if one only had the key. The clue being lacking, it remains
an idle curiosity, to fret and obstruct the mind, a dead weight to
burden it.

The second evil in this external presentation is lack of motivation.
There are not only no facts or truths which have been previously felt
as such with which to appropriate and assimilate the new, but there is
no craving, no need, no demand. When the subject-matter has been
psychologized, that is, viewed as an out-growth of present tendencies