Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/100

 hopes, desires, plans, and experiences, the latter would lose pretty much all their contents. Because of limitations of experience and of intelligence, there are many affairs of others that a child cannot make his own; but within these limits a child's identification of his own concerns with those of others is naturally even more intense than that of grown persons. He has not come into business rivalries with them; the number of people whom he meets who are not sympathetic with his concerns is small; it is through entering into the actions of others, directly and imaginatively, that he finds the most significant and the most rewarding of all his experiences. In these regards, a child is likely to be more social in his interests than the average adult.

This social interest not only, then, interfuses and permeates his interest in his own actions and sufferings, but it also suffuses his interest in things. Adults are so accustomed to making a sharp distinction between their relations to things and to other persons; their pursuits in life are so largely specialized along the line of having to do with things just as things, that it is difficult