Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/70

 the matter is quite different. Tasks in the former sense are educative because they supply an indispensable stimulus to thinking, to reflective inquiry. Tasks in the latter sense signify nothing but sheer strain, constraint, and the need of some external motivation for keeping at them. They are uneducative because they fail to introduce a clearer consciousness of ends and a search for proper means of realization. They are miseducative, because they deaden and stupefy; they lead to that confused and dulled state of mind that always attends an action carried on without a realizing sense of what it is all about. They are also miseducative because they lead to dependence upon external ends; the child works simply because of the pressure of the taskmaster, and diverts his energies just in the degree in which this pressure is relaxed; or he works because of some alien inducement—to get some reward that has no intrinsic connection with what he is doing.

The question to be borne in mind is, then, twofold: Is this person doing something too easy for him—something which has not a sufficient