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of geographical knowledge it is fatally restricted. In precisely
analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and counters may be helpful
aids to a realization of numerical relations, but when employed
except as aids to thought -- the apprehension of meaning--they
become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical understanding.
They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific physical
symbols. Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools of
calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual
must progress from concrete to abstract symbols -- that is,
symbols whose meaning is realized only through conceptual
thinking. And undue absorption at the outset in the physical
object of sense hampers this growth. (c) A thoroughly false
psychology of mental development underlay sensationalistic
empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter of activities,
instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with things.
What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some
activity of handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon
an object, and the consequent effect of the object upon the
direction of activities. (See ante, p. 140.) Fundamentally (as
we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of experience as
a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion of it
as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The neglect of the
deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal
defect of the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more
uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons
which ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency
to learn about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they
are put through trying to do something with them.
It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of
experience represented by modern empiricism had received more
general theoretical assent than has been accorded to it, it could
not have furnished a satisfactory philosophy of the learning
process. Its educational influence was confined to injecting a
new factor into the older curriculum, with incidental
modifications of the older studies and methods. It introduced
greater regard for observation of things directly and through
pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the importance
attached to verbal symbolization. But its own scope was so
meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed
more directly to thought. Consequently it left unimpaired the
scope of informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.
3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated
that sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of
experience justified by modern psychology nor the idea of
knowledge suggested by modern scientific procedure. With respect
to the former, it omits the primary position of active response
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Democracy and Education
205
which puts things to use and which learns about them through
discovering the consequences that result from use. It would seem
as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an infant
gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that
he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated
ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it
would be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of
handling, reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow
upon motor response to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen
that what is learned are not isolated qualities, but the behavior
which may be expected from a thing, and the changes in things and
persons which an activity may be expected to produce. In other
words, what he learns are connections. Even such qualities as
red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated and
identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are
hard and what are soft by finding out through active
experimentation what they respectively will do and what can be
done and what cannot be done with them. In like fashion,
children learn about persons by finding out what responsive
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