Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

The Moral Significance of the Common School Studies (1909)

The Moral Significance of the Common School Studies (1909) IT MAY ASSIST COMPREHENSION OF the more specific portions of this paper if we begin with stating the standpoint from which the paper is conceived. Why should we expect the subject-matter of school studies to have any moral value? How can bodies of knowledge, of information, get transmuted into character? Have we any right to suppose that the miracle of changing facts, ideas, artistic products into the fibre of personal endeavor can be wrought? Unless we bear two principles in mind—bear them in mind by engraving them in practice—the expectation is unreasonable. The two principles are that the subject-matter of the studies represents the results of past human social struggles and achievements, and that mind—the capacities of knowing by which the subject-matter is laid hold of and digested—is a manifestation of primary impulses in their efforts to master the environments. Because art, natural science, and mathematics have been evolved in the doings and sufferings of man, they are something more than merely intellectual; they are the outcome of human desire, passion, endeavor, success and failure. They have not been produced by some mind in the abstract, interested only in knowing , but have been worked out in the long-continued, arduous struggle of man to come into sound and effective connection with nature and with fellowman. Because of this fact they are full of moral meaning. In like fashion, the powers with which children assimilate subject-matter are outgrowths of native instincts and reactions, tendencies much more akin to hunger, thirst, reaching, handling, moving about than to separate independent faculties of theoretical knowing. First published in Northern Illinois Teachers’ Association, Topics for General Sessions: Moral and Religious Training in Public Schools, 5–6 November 1909, 21–27. 81 82 The School Curriculum These general statements indicate the source both of failure and of success in using subject-matter as a means of moral nurture. When studies are treated as just so many studies to be learned by pure intellectual faculties of memory, thought, etc., the moral outcome is insecure and accidental. When they are treated as human achievements, appealing to tendencies in childhood which are aiming however unconsciously and partially at similar achievements, the moral connection is positive and direct. Art, of which literature is only one branch, though the one most readily available for school uses, is perhaps the most unmixed and the simplest record of the consummation of human endeavor. For this reason, it has been overworked in the schools as a moral force compared with other subjects. Children are easily stimulated,—their emotions are stirred,—and teachers are apt to assume that a somewhat momentary reaction of the feelings is a distinct ethical gain. In the early years, serious limitations attend the use of reading matter. The child’s capacity to take in ideas through eye-symbols is so slight that “literature” is apt to be puerile intellectually, and the best of intentions to point a moral do not make up for triviality and paucity of ideas. For this reason, the ear is the natural channel, but there is danger that even oral stories and poems be made up on the basis of success in catching momentary attention and arousing signs of excitement. It is not a matter of accident that classic stories, as nearly as possible in their classic form, are more valuable than stories or poems composed for children. They are classics because they have passed through the medium of successive generations and have been proved true to the essentials of human experience. Their endurance is the stamp of their sterling, their genuine nature, while things written for children are mostly only paper money, even if not counterfeit. The chief protection lies in remembering that literature is a branch of art, so that if the literary material, whether prose or poetry, oral or printed, does not show the marks of highly selected, purified and refined experience, its effect upon children, even when striking, is likely to be sensational rather than morally educative. Physical reactions and the emotional thrills that accompany them closely simulate moral responses, and the parent or teacher who judges the worth of story and poems on the basis of the immediate excitement aroused instead of judging the latter on the basis of the intrinsic significance of the experiences condensed in the work of art is turning the scale of values upside down. Given genuine art, genuine crystallization...