may be identical
in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it
is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a
different import.

Our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct
activity having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning found in
geography and history, and then to scientifically organized knowledge,
was based upon the idea of maintaining a vital connection between
knowledge and activity. What is learned and employed in an occupation
having an aim and involving cooperation with others is moral knowledge,
whether consciously so regarded or not. For it builds up a social
interest and confers the intelligence needed to make that interest
effective in practice. Just because the studies of the curriculum
represent standard factors in social life, they are organs of initiation
into social values. As mere school studies, their acquisition has only
a technical worth. Acquired under conditions where their social
significance is realized, they feed moral interest and develop moral
insight. Moreover, the qualities of mind discussed under the topic
of method of learning are all of them intrinsically moral qualities.
Open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook,
thoroughness, assumption of responsibility for developing the
consequences of ideas which are accepted, are moral traits. The habit
of identifying moral characteristics with external conformity to
authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the ethical value of
these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends to reduce morals
to a dead and machinelike routine. Consequently while such an attitude
has moral results, the results are morally undesirable--above all in a
democratic society where so much depends upon personal disposition.

4. The Social and the Moral. All of the separations which we have been
criticizing--and which the idea of education set forth in the
previous chapters is designed to avoid--spring from taking morals too
narrowly,--giving them, on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn
without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed,
and, on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so
as to limit morals to a list of definitely stated acts. As a matter of
fact, morals are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with
others. And potentially this includes all our acts, even though their
social bearing