n common sense (as it will surely
do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.

And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims.
Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract
idea like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely
varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and
with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even
the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more
harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather
suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and
how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete
situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has
said: "To lead this boy to read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's
stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying
from John's make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,--these
are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the
concrete work of education." Bearing these qualifications in mind, we
shall proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good
educational aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded upon the
intrinsic activities and needs (including original instincts and
acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. The tendency of
such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers,
and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In
general, there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear
to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the
capacities of those educated. There is also an inclination to propound
aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and
requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something
which happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger
range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the
abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may amount
to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain
tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the adult
achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance of
the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood.
So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to