John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics
outside the school to be of great value were excluded because the principles of symbolic interpretation did not apply to them. These same principles led, moreover, to an exaggerated preference for geometrically abstract forms, and to insistence upon rigid adherence to a highly elaborate technique for dealing with them. Only within the last generation have the advances of science and philosophy brought about recognition of the direct value of actions and a freer utilization of play and occupational activities. Conceived in this freer and more scientific way, the principles of Froebel undoubtedly represent the greatest advance yet made in the recognition of the possibilities of bodily action in educative growth. The methods of Montessori are based on a like recognition, with the advantage of additional technical knowledge; and if the tendency to reduce them to isolated mechanical exercises (a tendency unfortunately attendant upon the spread of every definitely formulated system) can be resisted or overcome, they undoubtedly suggest further resources that can be utilized with younger children, or with older children whose sensori-motor development has been retarded.
2. In this discussion of physical activity I have had in mind for the most part that of the organs of the body, especially the hands, as employed directly with simple materials, or at most such simple appliances as a pencil, a brush, etc. A higher form of activity involving the sensori-motor apparatus of the body is found when the control over external objects is achieved by means of tools of some sort, or by the application of one material to another. The use of a saw, a gimlet, a plane, of modeling-sticks, etc., illustrate the intervention of tools. The use of a thread in sewing, the application of heat and moisture in cooking or other simple experimentations, illustrate the use of one thing (or mode of energy) to bring about a change in another thing. There is, of course, no sharp distinction, either in practice or in principle, between this form of activity and the more direct kind just discussed. The organs of the body—especially the hands—may be regarded as a kind of tools whose use is to be learned by trying and thinking. Tools may be regarded as a sort of extension of the bodily organs. But the growing use of the latter opens a new line of development so important in its consequences that it is worth while to give it distinctive recognition. It is the discovery and use of extra-organic tools which has made possible, both in the history of the race and of the individual, complicated activities of a long duration—that is, with results that are long postponed. And, as we have already seen, it is this prolongation and postponement which requires an increasing use of intelligence. The use of tools and appliances (in the broad sense) also demands a greater degree of technical skill than does mastery of the use of the natural organs—or rather, it involves the problem of a progressively more complicated use of the latter—and hence stimulates a new line of development.
Roughly speaking, the use of such intervening appliances marks off games and work on one side, from play on the other. For a time children are satisfied with such changes as they can bring about with their hands and by locomotion and transportation. Other changes which they cannot so effect they are satisfied to imagine, without an actual physical modification. Let us "play"—let us "make-believe" that things are so and so, suffices. One thing may be made to stand for another, irrespective of its actual fitness. Thus leaves become dishes, bright stones articles of food, splinters of wood knives and forks, when children are playing at setting a table. In free play things are plastic to alter their nature as mood or passing need dictates; chairs now serve as wagons, now as a train of cars, now as boats, etc. In games, however, there are rules to be followed; so that things have to be used in definite ways, since they are means for accomplishing definite ends, as a club is a bat for hitting a ball. In similar fashion, children as their powers mature want real dishes, real articles of food; and are better satisfied if they can actually make a fire and cook. They want to use the things that are fitted to their purposes and that will really accomplish certain results, instead of effecting them only in fancy. It will be found that the change comes with ability to carry a purpose in mind for a longer time. The little child is impatient, as we say, for immediate returns. He cannot wait to get the appropriate means and use them in the appropriate way to achieve the end: not because he is physically more impatient than older persons, but because an end that is not achieved almost at once gets away from his mind. To execute his purpose he makes his "means" realize his ideas at one stroke of the magic wand of imagination. But as ideas persist for a longer time they can be employed to effect an actual transformation of conditions—a process that almost always requires the intervention of tools, or the use of intervening appliances.
There seems to be no better name for the acts of using intermediate means, or appliances, to reach ends than work. When employed in this way, however, work must be distinguished from labor and from toil and drudgery. Labor means a form of work in which the direct result accomplished is of value only as a means of exchange for something else. It is an economic term, being applied to that form of work where the product is paid for, and the money paid is used for objects of more direct values. Toil implies unusual arduousness in a task, involving fatigue. Drudgery is an activity which in itself is quite disagreeable, performed under the constraint of some quite extraneous need. Play and work cannot, therefore, be distinguished from one another according to the presence or absence of direct interest in what is doing. A child engaged in making something with tools, say, a boat, may be just as immediately interested in what he is doing as if he were sailing the boat. He is not doing what he does for the mere sake of an external result—the boat—nor for the mere sake of sailing it later. The thought of the finished product and of the use to which it is to be put may come to his mind, but so as to enhance his immediate activity of construction In this case, his interest is free. He has a play-motive; his activity is essentially artistic in principle. What differentiates it from more spontaneous play is an intellectual quality; a remoter end in time serves to suggest and regulate a series of acts. Not to introduce an element of work in this sense when the child is ready for it is simply arbitrarily to arrest his development, and to force his activities to a level of sense-excitation after he is prepared to act upon the basis of an idea. A mode of activity that was quite normal in its own period becomes disintegrating when persisted in after a person is ripe for an activity involving more thought. We must also remember that the change from an activity with an end near by to one with an end farther off does not come all at once, nor at the same time with respect to all things. A child may be ready for occupation with tools like scissors, paint and brush, for setting a table, cooking, etc., while with respect to other activities he is still unable to plan and arrange ahead. Thus there is no ground for the assumption that children of kindergarten age are capable only of make-believe play, while children of the primary grades should be held to all work and no play. Only the false idea about symbolism leads to the former conclusion; and only a false identification of interest and play with trivial amusement leads to the latter conclusion. It has been said that man is man only as he plays; to say this involves some change from the meaning in which play has just been used. But in the broader sense of whole-hearted identification with what one is doing—in the sense of completeness of interest, it is so true that it should be a truism.
Work in the sense in which it has been defined covers all activities involving the use of intervening materials, appliances, and forms of skill consciously used in achieving results. It covers all forms of expression and construction with tools and materials, all forms of artistic and manual activity so far as they involve the conscious or thoughtful endeavor to achieve an end. They include, that is, painting, drawing, clay modeling, singing so far as there is any conscious attention to means—to the technique of execution. They comprehend the various forms of manual training, work with wood, metal, textiles, cooking, sewing, etc., so far as these involve an idea of the result to be accomplished (instead of working from dictation or an external model which does away with the need for thought). They cover also the manual side of scientific inquiry, the collection of materials for study, the management of apparatus, the sequence of acts required in carrying on and in recording experiments.
3. So far as this latter interest—the interest in discovery or in finding out what happens under given circumstances—gains in importance, there develops a third type of interest—the distinctively intellectual interest. Our wording should be carefully noted. The intellectual interest is not a new thing, now showing itself for the first time. Our discussion of the development of the so-called physical activities of a baby, and of the constructive work of children, youth, and adults has been intended to show that intelligence, in the