Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/25

 to be given to this external material to satisfy the requirements of the teacher, while saving up the rest of his powers for following out lines of suggestion that appeal to him. I do not say that there is absolutely no moral training involved in forming these habits of external attention, but I say that there is also a question of moral import as to the formation of habits of intellectual dissipation.

While we are congratulating ourselves upon the well-disciplined habits which the pupil is acquiring (judged by his ability to reproduce a lesson when called upon) we forget to commiserate ourselves because his deeper nature has secured no discipline at all, but has been left to follow its own caprices and the disordered suggestions of the moment. I do not see how anyone can deny that the training of habits of imagination and lines of emotional indulgence is at least equally important with the development of certain outward habits of action. For myself, when it comes to the moral question, not merely to that of practical convenience, I think it is infinitely more important. Nor do I see how anyone at all