We might, therefore, turn at once
to the consideration of the various means for such teaching that
experience has shown to be practicable in the school. But before doing
so, there is yet another reason, the most far-reaching of all, to be
urged for regarding this as a side of education fully as necessary,
at the present time above all, as those sides that none would
question. Great as is the direct and immediate value of the interests
and occupations thus to be encouraged, their indirect influence is
more valuable still, if they teach not only handiness and
adaptiveness, but also call forth initiative and individuality, and so
help to develop the complete and many-sided human personality which is
the crown and purpose of education as of life. We do not now think of
education as merely book-learning, nor even as concerned only with
mind and body, or only as fitting preparation for skilled work and
cultured leisure; but rather as the development of the whole human
being, with all his possibilities, interests, and motives, as well as
powers, his feelings and imagination no less than reason and will. In
a word, education is training for life, with all that this connotes,
and, as we learn to live only by living, must be thought of not merely
as preparation for life, but as a life itself. Plainly, if we give it
a meaning as wide as this, a great part of education lies outside the
school, in the influences of the home surroundings and, after school,
of occupation and the whole social environment.
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