remote and alien to everyday
experience are learned. Activity is divided, and two separate worlds are
built up, occupying activity at divided periods. No transmutation takes
place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting its
connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by entering
into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is not even left as it
was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses something of its mobility and
sensitiveness to suggestions. It is weighed down and pushed into
a corner by a load of unassimilated information. It parts with its
flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. Mere
amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life makes
mind wooden; elasticity disappears.

Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond
its immediate self. It does not passively wait for information to be
bestowed which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. Curiosity is
not an accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of
the fact that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all
kinds of connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency
to make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of educators to
supply an environment so that this reaching out of an experience may be
fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active. Within a certain kind
of environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning
which accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. One may
cook, or hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take
the mind any farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering,
and walking in the literal--or physical--sense. But nevertheless
the consequences of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a
displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt
wherever there is matter. It involves the structure of the limbs and the
nervous system; the principles of mechanics. To cook is to utilize heat
and moisture to change the chemical relations of food materials; it has
a bearing upon the assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The
utmost that the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry,
physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and connections
perceptible. The task of education, once more, is to see to it that
such activities are performed in such ways and under such conditions as
rende