Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/99

 solving the problem, interest is distinctively intellectual.

4. Social interest, interest in persons, is a strong special interest, and also one which intertwines with those already named. Small children's concern with persons is remarkably intense. Their dependence upon others for support and guidance, if nothing else, provides a natural basis for attention to people and for a wish to enter into intimate connections with them. Then distinctively social instincts, such as sympathy, imitation, love of approval, etc., come in. Children's contact with other persons is continuous; and there are practically no activities of a child that are isolated. His own activities are so bound up with others, and what others do touches him so deeply and in so many ways, that it is only at rare moments, perhaps of a clash of wills, that a child draws a sharp line between other peoples' affairs as definitely theirs and his own as exclusively his. His father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his home, his friends are his; they belong to his idea of himself. If they were cut away from his thought of himself, and from his