Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/35

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TRAINING OF PERSONALITY.
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the unseen world. Hence Dewey's ideal must be supplemented by Professor Muirhead's when he tells us[1] that "the main problem of the immediate future is to reinspire our educational system with the religious idea, the idea that the task to which the teacher is called is nothing less than the opening of the soul to all the influences, spiritual, social, aesthetic, cosmic, that call to it from the unseen, and thus to fit it for its true life." By holding fast, therefore, to the principles of personality we can maintain the educational point of view against these heresies. But heresies are always one-sided statements of partial truths, and our principle enables us to see the element of truth in the views we have rejected.

Of the three great spheres of interest which we have distinguished, mastery of environment, the common life, and devotion to the ideal, Thorndike is concerned primarily with the first, and Dewey with the first and second. Their theories are incomplete because they fail to do justice to ideal interests, but they have much to teach us in regard to the subjects of which they treat. From Thorndike, for instance, we may learn the importance of many details in the boy's school environment which we are tempted to neglect. From Dewey we may learn that our curriculum and teaching methods in the broadest sense must provide the boy with an introduction to his after life, and therefore he must begin to achieve at school the interests which will occupy his manhood.


  1. Reports on Moral Training, ed. Sadler, vol. i., p. 68.