itself
is an organization of original capacities into activities having
significance. As we have already seen (ante, p. 204), in older pupils
work is to educative development of raw native activities what play is
for younger pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work should be
gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but carrying into
work the elements of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf
of greater control. The reader will remark that these five points
practically resume the main contentions of the previous part of the
work. Both practically and philosophically, the key to the present
educational situation lies in a gradual reconstruction of school
materials and methods so as to utilize various forms of occupation
typifying social callings, and to bring out their intellectual and
moral content. This reconstruction must relegate purely literary
methods--including textbooks--and dialectical methods to the position of
necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent development of consecutive
and cumulative activities.

But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a
technical preparation for industries and professions as they now
operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions
in the school. The problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct
to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry
to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more
connected with out-of-school experience. The problem is not easy of
solution. There is a standing danger that education will perpetuate
the older traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the
newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of acquiescence
in the untransformed, unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our
defective industrial regime. Put in concrete terms, there is danger that
vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade
education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized
future pursuits. Education would then become an instrument of
perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society,
instead of operating as a means of its transformation. The desired
transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way. It signifies
a society in which every person shall be occupied in something which
makes the lives of others b