e
absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an
interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We say
of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and
that he has found himself in it. Both terms express the engrossment of
the self in an object.

When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first
exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely the
effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or
failure. Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are
reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it
then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some
feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure
attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is
properly stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of
education.

But the objection is based upon the fact--or assumption--that the forms
of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have
no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to
be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The remedy is not
in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to
search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material.
It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with
present powers. The function of this material in engaging activity and
carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. If the
material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
semi-coerced effort.

The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,--that
which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance
covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes
time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We
overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between
an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is
something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are
the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
Between the two lie means--that is middle conditions:--acts to be