nly a special
case under living, and education a special case under life. Its
purposes are the purposes of life. It is an artificial and rapid
recapitulation for the individual, in method and results, of past life
itself. The purpose of education is "adaptation,--with the retention
of adaptability." It is to bring the individual into attunement,
through his own responses and growth, with all the real factors,
external and internal, in his life,--material, intellectual,
emotional, social, and spiritual,--and at the same time leave him
plastic.

Adaptation comes through the habit-forming experiences of stimulus and
response. The very process of adaptation, therefore, tends toward
fixity and to destroy adaptability. It is thus the task of education,
as it is of life, to replace the native, inexperienced and
physiological plasticity of youth with some product of experience
which shall be able to revise habits in the interest of new
situations. The adaptability of the experienced person must be
psychical and acquired. It must be in the realm of appreciation,
attitude, choice, self-direction--a realm superior to habit.

In this human task of securing adaptation and retaining adaptiveness
the life sciences have high rank. In addition to furnishing the very
conception itself that we have been trying to phrase, they give
illustrations of all the historic occasions, kinds, and modes of
adaptation; in lacking the exactness of the mathematical and physical
sciences they furnish precisely the degree of uncertainty and openness
of opportunity and of mental state which the act of living itself
demands. In other words the science of life is, if properly presented,
the most normal possible introduction to the very practical art of
living. Because of the parallel meaning of education and life in
securing progressive adaptation to the essential influential forces of
the universe, an appreciative study of biology introduces directly to
the purposes and methods of human education.

CHIEF AIMS OF BIOLOGY AS A COLLEGE SUBJECT

=Why study biology in college?=

While students differ in the details of their purposes in life, all
must learn to make the broad adjustments to the physical conditions of
life; to the problems of food and nutrition; to other organisms,
helpful and hurtful; to the internal impulses, tendencies, and
appetites; to the various necessary human contacts and relations; to
the great body of knowledge important to life