Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/55

. He will find that wherever his activities have grown in extent and range of meaning (instead of becoming petrified and fossilized), one or other (or both) of two things has been going on. On the one hand, narrower and simpler types of interest (requiring a shorter time for their realization) have been expanding to cover a longer time. With this change they have grown richer and fuller. They have grown to include many things previously indifferent or even repulsive as the value of the end now takes up into itself the value of whatever is involved in the process of achieving it. On the other hand, many things, that were first of significance only because they were needed as parts of an activity of interest only as a whole, have become valued on their own account. Sometimes it will even be found that they have displaced entirely the type of activity in connection with which they originally grew up. This is just what happens when children outgrow interests that have previously held them; as when boys feel it is now beneath them to play marbles and girls find themselves no longer interested in their dolls.