e, manage a machine, calculate, drive a
horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular
tendency to regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a
sort of miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the
strong tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action
with knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic
conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically
formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial
subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving
the use of the body and the handling of material, the subject matter of
instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and
so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
Recognition of the natural course of development, on the contrary,
always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. Arts
and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding
as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends.
Popular terms denoting knowledge have always retained the connection
with ability in action lost by academic philosophies. Ken and can are
allied words. Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
affection and of looking out for its welfare. Mind means carrying out
instructions in action--as a child minds his mother--and taking care
of something--as a nurse minds the baby. To be thoughtful, considerate,
means to heed the claims of others. Apprehension means dread of
undesirable consequences, as well as intellectual grasp. To have
good sense or judgment is to know the conduct a situation calls for;
discernment is not making distinctions for the sake of making them, an
exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair
with reference to acting. Wisdom has never lost its association with
the proper direction of life. Only in education, never in the life of
farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does
knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in acquaintance
or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted with are the things we
put to frequent use--such things as chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes,
food, knives and forks on the commonplace level, differentiating into
more special objects according to a person's occupations