lum which acknowledges the social
responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are
relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and
information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.

Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of the
meanings which supply content to existing social life. The continuity of
social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present
activity by past collective experience. As social life grows more
complex, these factors increase in number and import. There is need of
special selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may
be adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very process
tends to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself,
apart from its function in promoting the realization of the meanings
implied in the present experience of the immature. Especially is the
educator exposed to the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the
pupil's ability to appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set
statements, irrespective of its organization into his activities as a
developing social member. The positive principle is maintained when the
young begin with active occupations having a social origin and use,
and proceed to a scientific insight in the materials and laws involved,
through assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and
facts communicated by others who have had a larger experience. 1 Since
the learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood
that these contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier
stages of learning at least they are practically all-important.

Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum

1. The Place of Active Occupations in Education. In consequence partly
of the efforts of educational reformers, partly of increased interest in
child-psychology, and partly of the direct experience of the schoolroom,
the course of study has in the past generation undergone considerable
modification. The desirability of starting from and with the experience
and capacities of learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters,
has led to the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work,
similar to those in which children and youth engage outside of school.
Modern psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made faculties
of older theory a complex group of instinctive and