em to beginners as the "simple" things. But it is time
for a positive statement. Aside from the fact that active occupations
represent things to do, not studies, their educational significance
consists in the fact that they may typify social situations. Men's
fundamental common concerns center about food, shelter, clothing,
household furnishings, and the appliances connected with production,
exchange, and consumption.

Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with which
the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a deep level;
they are saturated with facts and principles having a social quality.

To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving,
construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry
over these fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a
merely bread and butter value is to miss their point. If the mass of
mankind has usually found in its industrial occupations nothing but
evils which had to be endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the
fault is not in the occupations, but in the conditions under which
they are carried on. The continually increasing importance of economic
factors in contemporary life makes it the more needed that education
should reveal their scientific content and their social value. For in
schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but for their
own content. Freed from extraneous associations and from the pressure
of wage-earning, they supply modes of experience which are intrinsically
valuable; they are truly liberalizing in quality.

Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time.
It affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and
horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they
occupy in present social organization. Carried on in an environment
educationally controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts
of growth, the chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture,
injurious and helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the
elementary study of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in
connection with caring for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject
matter belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong
to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with the
facts of soil, animal life, and human r