In the same way, vocation is having great
influence upon the higher terminal stages of education. All this is
part of the most important of all correlations, the correlation of
school with life.
But the child's interest in things is social. Through the primitive
occupations of mankind, he is entering step by step into the heritage
of the race and into a richer fuller personal experience. The science
which enlists a child's interest is not that which is presented from
the logical, abstract point of view. The way in which the child
acquires it is the same as that in which mankind acquired it--his
occupation presents certain difficulties, to overcome these
difficulties he has to exercise his thought, he invents and
experiments; and so thought reacts upon occupation, occupation reacts
upon thought. And out of that reciprocal action science is born. In
the same way his play is social--in his games too he enters into the
heritage of the race, and in playing them he is learning unconsciously
the greatest of all arts, the art of living with others. In his play
as well as in his school work the lines of his natural development
show how he can be trained to co-operate with the law of human
progress.
This fitness and readiness to co-operate with the great movement of
human progress, all-round fitness of body, mind and spirit, provides
the formula which fuses and reconciles two growing tendencies in
modern education.
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