al
discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of
which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature
of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an
interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens,
however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a
consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the
curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects
by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from
their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords
an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests
on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into
connection with one another.

1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is
indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things
and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is
one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and
hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language,
all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical
language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated."
It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something
in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through
the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of
personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not
for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant
affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the
brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon
the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate
experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting
it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is
doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify
an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on
letters for effective representative or indirect experience.

At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there
is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger
that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make
it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of rep