see the
import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use
adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the
doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a
fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.

(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating
with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the
kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and
unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter
is worthless. Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it
prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the
situation. It operates to exclude recognition of everything except what
squares up with the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because
it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful
attention to concrete conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is
the use of noting details which do not count?

The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive
them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what
is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As
a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is
confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is
the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative
supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that
he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and
the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher's experience is then
reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter
receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition,
and are constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are
natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are
taught to acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic
significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be
intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.

(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged
to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is,
of course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out
indefinitely into other things.