cal rehearsal.

It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were
confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope
is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation
of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also
tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of
excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium
so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and
rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of
attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas,
principles, and problems is vitally brought home.

2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from
the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response
involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure
"facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field.
The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any
activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to
identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and
intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an
exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and
something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and
appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters,
leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative
acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information.
Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to
recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is
still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of
childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between
play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a
difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The
result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal"
phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to
a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results.
Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned
machine can do better than a human being