Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/859

 SOME DEMANDS OF SOCIOLOGY UPON PEDAGOGY 843

I assume that both action and information are unchallenged means of modern pedagogy. With their proportions and with their appropriate sequence at different stages of culture, sociology is not directly concerned. Sociology has no tolerance, however, for the pedantry that persists in carpentering together educational courses out of subjects which are supposed to exercise, first, the perceptive faculty, then the memory, then the language fac- ulty, then the logical faculty, etc. On the contrary, every represented contact of a person with a portion of reality sooner or later calls into exercise every mental power of that person, probably in a more rational order and proportion than can be produced by an artificial process. Our business as teachers is primarily, therefore, not to train particular mental powers, but to select points of contact between learning minds and the reality that is to be learned. The mind's own autonomy will look out for the appropriate series of subjective mental processes. In the second place, our business as teachers is to bring these perceptive contacts of pupils' minds with points of objective reality into true association with all the remainder of objective reality, i. < ., we should help pupils first to see things, and, second, to see things together as they actually exist in reality. In other words, the demand of sociology upon pedagogy is that it shall stop wet-nursing orphan mental faculties and find out how to bring persons into touch with what objectively is, as it is. The mind itself will do the rest.

In pursuance of this demand, sociology necessarily becomes an active partisan upon one of the pedagogical doctrines over which educators are divided : viz., sociology denies that the rational center for the concentration of studies is any science or group of sciences. The rational center is the student himself. Personal adaptation to life means the given person's organization of his contacts with reality. In other words, pedagogy should be the science of assisting youth to organize their contacts with reality ; and by this I mean to organize these contacts with ity by both thought and action, and for both thought and action. Relatively the world stands still during the school age of any