ind constitutes
to him, for the time being, the whole universe. That universe is fluid
and fluent; its contents dissolve and re-form with amazing rapidity.
But, after all, it is the child's own world. It has the unity and
completeness of his own life. He goes to school, and various studies
divide and fractionize the world for him. Geography selects, it
abstracts and analyzes one set of facts, and from one particular point
of view. Arithmetic is another division, grammar another department, and
so on indefinitely.

Again, in school each of these subjects is classified. Facts are torn
away from their original place in experience and rearranged with
reference to some general principle. Classification is not a matter
of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed.
The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold
together the variety of his personal experiences. The adult mind is so
familiar with the notion of logically ordered facts that it does not
recognize--it cannot realize--the amount of separating and reformulating
which the facts of direct experience have to undergo before they can
appear as a "study," or branch of learning. A principle, for the
intellect, has had to be distinguished and defined; facts have had
to be interpreted in relation to this principle, not as they are in
themselves. They have had to be regathered about a new center which is
wholly abstract and ideal. All this means a development of a special
intellectual interest. It means ability to view facts impartially and
objectively; that is, without reference to their place and meaning in
one's own experience. It means capacity to analyze and to synthesize. It
means highly matured intellectual habits and the command of a definite
technique and apparatus of scientific inquiry. The studies as classified
are the product, in a word, of the science of the ages, not of the
experience of the child.

These apparent deviations and differences between child and curriculum
might be almost indefinitely widened. But we have here sufficiently
fundamental divergences: first, the narrow but personal world of the
child against the impersonal but infinitely extended world of space and
time; second, the unity, the single wholeheartedness of the child's
life, and the specializations and divisions of the curriculum; third, an
abstract principle of logical classification and arrangement, and the
practical and emotional bonds of chi