Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/857

 SOME DEMANDS OF SOCIOLOGY UPON PEDAGOGY 841

correspond with the essential conditions to which human action must learn to conform. A graduate of a leading eastern univer- sity, who is now making an impression upon American pedagogy, said recently that when he took his diploma, about ten years ago, history, to his mind, was a collection of material which he had studied under Professor A; political economy, another independ- ent body of information which he studied under Professor B; psychology, another isolated subject which he had studied under Professor C, and so on through the curriculum. Not until six or seven years after graduation did it dawn upon him that each of these details of representation is an aspect of one reality, which the pedagogy of the college had concealed in making the fragments prominent. The most serious consideration about this pedagogical perversion is not that it limits knowledge alone. It distorts the whole attitude of men toward the world. Instead of introducing men to reality it tricks them into belief that an unorganized procession of pedantic abstractions is reality.

The report of the Committee of Ten presents to the sociolo- gist, therefore, this anomaly. It is a whole made up of parts every one of which may possibly be accepted by sociology, but the totality, as presented by the committee, sociology must per- emptorily reject. It is hot on the trail of pedagogical and socio- logical truth, without actually coming within sight of the truth. Human personality is not doomed to struggle forever seriatim with a long list of detached groups of facts, in order to get its psvchic and social development. The world of experience is one, not many. Pedagogy and sociology are discovering this unity by different processes, and as a consequence of their per- ception that educational material is essentially one, not many, pedagogy and sociology are bound to combine their demands for a complete change of front in education. The proper educator is reality, not conventionalized abstractions from reality. Hence the demand of the new pedagogy, supported heartily by the new sociology, that schooling, particularly in its earlier stages, shall be changed from an afflictive imposition upon life to rationally concentrated accomplishment of a portion of life itself. Hence