e measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience. Mere
activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal,
dissipating. Experience as trying involves change, but change is
meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the
return wave of consequences which flow from it. When an activity is
continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made
by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is
loaded with significance. We learn something. It is not experience when
a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the
movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence.
Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn. Being
burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood,
if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action. Blind and
capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So
far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that
cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that
term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure
and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own.
They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no before
or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently
no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what
is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves
to what is coming--no added control. Only by courtesy can such an
experience be called experience. To "learn from experience" is to make a
backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we
enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing
becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is
like; the undergoing becomes instruction--discovery of the connection of
things.

Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is
primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. But
(2) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception
of relationships or continuities to which it leads up. It includes
cognition in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts to
something, or has meaning. In schools, those under instruction are
too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical
spectators, mind