re-products of past ages (either in general, or more
specifically in the particular literatures which were produced in
the culture epoch which is supposed to correspond with the stage of
development of those taught) affords another instance of that divorce
between the process and product of growth which has been criticized. To
keep the process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it easier
to keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational subject
matter. But an individual can live only in the present. The present
is not just something which comes after the past; much less something
produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The
study of past products will not help us understand the present, because
the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they
were the products. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great
significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the
mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material
of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past,
and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more
or less futile imitation of the past. Under such circumstances, culture
becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and an asylum. Men escape
from the crudities of the present to live in its imagined refinements,
instead of using what the past offers as an agency for ripening these
crudities. The present, in short, generates the problems which lead us
to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we
find when we search. The past is the past precisely because it does
not include what is characteristic in the present. The moving present
includes the past on condition that it uses the past to direct its own
movement. The past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a
new dimension to life, but OD condition that it be seen as the past of
the present, and not as another and disconnected world. The principle
which makes little of the present act of living and operation of
growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks to the past
because the future goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But having
turned its back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden
with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to the
needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest of
motives for inter