t this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair
leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc. A
society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to
a limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within
each class. A progressive society counts individual variations as
precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence
a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for
intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its
educational measures.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education

1. The Meaning of Vocation. At the present time the conflict of
philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and
function of vocational factors in education. The bald statement that
significant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find
their chief issue in connection with this point may arouse incredulity:
there seems to be too great a gap between the remote and general terms
in which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete
details of vocational education. But a mental review of the intellectual
presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and
leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the
world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and
cultural education. Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to
the notions of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual
activity not involving the active use of bodily organs. Culture has also
tended, latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a
cultivation of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate
from either social direction or service. It has been an escape from the
former, and a solace for the necessity of the latter.

So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole
subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the
meaning of vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression
that an education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not
merely pecuniary. A vocation means nothing but such a direction of life
activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because
of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates.
The opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but
aimlessness, capriciousness, the