ld life.

From these elements of conflict grow up different educational sects.
One school fixes its attention upon the importance of the subject-matter
of the curriculum as compared with the contents of the child's own
experience. It is as if they said: Is life petty, narrow, and crude?
Then studies reveal the great, wide universe with all its fulness and
complexity of meaning. Is the life of the child egoistic, self-centered,
impulsive? Then in these studies is found an objective universe of
truth, law, and order. Is his experience confused, vague, uncertain,
at the mercy of the moment's caprice and circumstance? Then studies
introduce a world arranged on the basis of eternal and general truth; a
world where all is measured and defined. Hence the moral: ignore and
minimize the child's individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences.
They are what we need to get away from. They are to be obscured or
eliminated. As educators our work is precisely to substitute for these
superficial and casual affairs stable and well-ordered realities; and
these are found in studies and lessons.

Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; each lesson
into specific facts and formulae. Let the child proceed step by step to
master each one of these separate parts, and at last he will have
covered the entire ground. The road which looks so long when viewed in
its entirety is easily traveled, considered as a series of particular
steps. Thus emphasis is put upon the logical subdivisions and
consecutions of the subject-matter. Problems of instruction are problems
of procuring texts giving logical parts and sequences, and of presenting
these portions in class in a similar definite and graded way.
Subject-matter furnishes the end, and it determines method. The child is
simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial
being who is to be deepened; his is narrow experience which is to be
widened. It is his to receive, to accept. His part is fulfilled when he
is ductile and docile.

Not so, says the other sect. The child is the starting-point, the
center, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It
alone furnishes the standard. To the growth of the child all studies
are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needs
of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-matter. Not
knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal. To possess
all the world of knowled