school resources for bringing
about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal
experience. The active occupations described in the previous chapter
reach out in space and time with respect to both nature and man. Unless
they are taught for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their
chief educational value is that they provide the most direct and
interesting roads out into the larger world of meanings stated in
history and geography. While history makes human implications explicit
and geography natural connections, these subjects are two phases of
the same living whole, since the life of men in association goes on in
nature, not as an accidental setting, but as the material and medium of
development.

Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study

1. The Logical and the Psychological. By science is meant, as already
stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation,
reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure
a settled, assured subject matter. It involves an intelligent and
persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is
erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such
shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may
be as obvious as possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of
activity bringing about certain changes in the environment. But in its
case, the quality of the resulting knowledge is the controlling factor
and not an incident of the activity. Both logically and educationally,
science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage.

Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications
of any knowledge. Logical order is not a form imposed upon what is
known; it is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. For it means
that the statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to
one who understands it the premises from which it follows and the
conclusions to which it points (See ante, p. 190). As from a few bones
the competent zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a
statement in mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can
form an idea of the system of truths in which it has its place.

To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block.
Just because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance
of knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of
everyday life are hidden.