Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/84

 control his movements—all of these things are object-lessons, writ large, as to the nature of interest, and the intellectual significance of actions that (externally judged) are physical.

This period of growth occurs, of course, before children go to school; at least before they go to anything called school. But the amount and the mode of learning in this school of action is most significant in revealing the importance of types of occupation within the school involving the exercise of senses and movement. One of the reasons (as already indicated) for the slight advance made in putting in practice the doctrine of self-activity (with its recommendation of mental initiative and intellectual self-reliance, and its attacks upon the idea of pouring in and passive absorption) is precisely that it was supposed that self-activity could be secured purely internally, without the coöperation of bodily action through play, construction of objects, and manipulation of materials and tools. Only with children having specialized intellectual abilities is it possible to secure mental activity without participation of the organs of sense and the muscles. Yet how