omes and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of
a liberal share in what is worth while in life that unlettered and
uneducated have become almost synonymous.

The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its
dangers--dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice.
Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by
a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so
entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of "telling"
and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle
almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not
this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself
merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But
its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be
equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to
an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of instruction and
administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous
occupations with things. Not that the use of language as an educational
resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and
fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities. "These
things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others
undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with the
instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.

For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a
pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to
school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most
adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating
it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which
comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the
effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may
secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by
himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which
things have in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical
specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of
intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in
a joint activity, where one person's use of material and to