Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/101

 for them, practically impossible, to realize the extent to which children are concerned with things only as they enter into and affect the concerns of persons, and the extent to which a personal-social interest radiates upon objects and gives them their meaning and worth. A moment's consideration of children's plays shows how largely they are sympathetic and dramatic reproductions of social activities; and thereby affords a clew to the extent in which interest in things is borrowed from their ideas of what people do to and with things. Much of the so-called animistic tendency of children, their tendency to personify natural objects and events, is at bottom nothing but an overflow of their social interests. It is not so much that they literally conceive things to be alive, as that things are of interest to them only when they are encompassed with the interests they see exemplified in persons; otherwise things are, at first, more or less matters of indifference to them.

No doubt some of the repulsiveness of purely abstract intellectual studies to many children is simply the reflex of the fact that the things—the