Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/49

 attention to it less disagreeable than the consequences of non-attention so that study is a choice of the lesser of two evils?

Both of these methods, however, represent failure to ask the right question and to seek for the right method of solution. What course of activity exists already (by native endowment or by past achievement) operative in the pupil's experience with respect to which the thing to be learned, the mode of skill to be acquired, is either a means or an end? What line of action is there, that is to say, which can be carried forward to its appropriate termination better by noting and using the subject-matter? Or what line of action is there, which can be directed so that when carried to its completion it will naturally terminate in the things to be learned? The mistake, once more, consists in overlooking the activities in which the child is already engaged, or in assuming that they are so trivial or so irrelevant that they have no significance for education. When they are duly taken into account the new subject-matter is interesting on its own account in the degree in which it enters into their operation.