Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/108

 something else must of necessity be mere symbols; that is to say things that are not signs of anything, because the first-hand subject-matter which gives them meaning has been excluded or at least neglected. Or when objects—concrete facts, etc.—are introduced, it is as mere occasions for the mind to exercise its own separate powers—just as dumb-bells or pulleys and weights are a mere occasion for exercising the muscles. The world of studies then becomes a strange and peculiar world, because a world cut off from—abstracted from—the world in which pupils as human beings live and act and suffer. Lack of "interest," lack of power to hold attention and stir thought, are a necessary consequence of the unreality attendant upon such a realm for study. Then it is concluded that the "minds" of children or of people in general are averse to learning, are indifferent to the concerns of intelligence. But such indifference and aversion are always evidence—either directly or as a consequence of previous bad conditions—that the appropriate conditions for the exercise of mind are not there:—that they are