tivity of man has in appropriating and finding meanings
makes his education something else than the manufacture of a tool or
the training of an animal. The latter increase efficiency; they do
not develop significance. The final educational importance of such
occupations in play and work as were considered in the last chapter is
that they afford the most direct instrumentalities for such extension
of meaning. Set going under adequate conditions they are magnets for
gathering and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual
considerations. They provide vital centers for the reception and
assimilation of information. When information is purveyed in chunks
simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it tends to
stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor into an activity
pursued for its own sake--whether as a means or as a widening of the
content of the aim--it is informing. The insight directly gained fuses
with what is told. Individual experience is then capable of taking up
and holding in solution the net results of the experience of the group
to which he belongs--including the results of sufferings and trials over
long stretches of time. And such media have no fixed saturation point
where further absorption is impossible. The more that is taken in, the
greater capacity there is for further assimilation. New receptiveness
follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon information gained.

The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature
and man. This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when
translated into educational equivalents. So translated, it signifies
that geography and history supply subject matter which gives background
and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow
personal actions or mere forms of technical skill. With every increase
of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections,
our doings gain in significant content. We realize that we are citizens
of no mean city in discovering the scene in space of which we are
denizens, and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which
we are heirs and continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease
to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance. Of course if
geography and history are taught as ready-made studies which a person
studies simply because he is sent to school, it easily happens that a
large number of statements about things