In the
seventeenth century, the store was still small enough so that men set up
the ideal of a complete encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky
that the impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it
all is obvious. But the educational ideal has not been much affected.
Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch of learning,
or at least in a selected group, remains the principle by which the
curriculum, from elementary school through college, is formed; the
easier portions being assigned to the earlier years, the more difficult
to the later. The complaints of educators that learning does not enter
into character and affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work,
against cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts," against
devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and
principles, all follow from this state of affairs. Knowledge which
is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to become merely
verbal. It is no objection to information that it is clothed in words;
communication necessarily takes place through words. But in the degree
in which what is communicated cannot be organized into the existing
experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is, pure
sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. Then it operates to call out
mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat
statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums."

To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject
matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving
added significance to the search for solution and to the solution
itself. Informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back
upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It
is a kind of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It
has the office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in
available form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as
an agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told
that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is
three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the
diameter of the circle to its circumference is 3.1415. . . one receives
what is indeed knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to
knowing. His acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what
is communicated.

3. Science or Ratio