EDUCATION AND LIVING
BY
RANDOLPH BOURNE
Author of “Youth and Life,” “The
Gary Schools”
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1915, 1916, 1917, by
The Republic Publishing Co.
Published, April, 1917
[Pg v]
PREFACE
These papers, reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the“New Republic,” through the courtesy of the editors, do not pretendto be anything more than glimpses and paraphrases of new tendenciesin the American school and college. The public school is the mostinteresting and the most hopeful of our American social enterprisesduring these days of sluggishness for us and dreary horror for therest of the world. It is becoming one of the few rational and one ofthe few democratic things we have, and science and hope are layinga foundation upon which a really self-conscious society could buildalmost anything it chose. The school fascinates me because there isalmost no sociological, administrative or psychological truth thatcannot be drawn out of its manifold life. It is the laboratory forhuman nature, and the only one that is simple enough to study with anyprospect of quick enlightenment. Experiment in education has come to[Pg vi]stay, and this means that we have it in our hands to approach ever moreclosely our ideal of education as living. We can make the school evermore and more nearly that child-community life towards which our bestendeavor points.
The point-of-view of these papers will be recognized as the productof an enthusiasm for the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Butwhat is a good philosophy for except to paraphrase? The discovery oftruisms means merely that my enthusiasms are being communicated to anunappreciative reader. Certainly the most recent educational sensationindicates that there are still crowds of professional educators andparents to whom such ideas are not truisms. To see education, not as apreparation for life or as a process segregated from other activities,but as identical with living, takes more imagination than most teachershave yet acquired. If the school is a place where children liveintensively and expressively, it will be a place where they will learn.The ideal educational system would continue with the adult all throughhis or her active life, sharpening skill, interpreting experience,providing intellectual tools with which to express and enjoy. Just aseducation and play should[Pg vii] be scarcely separable for the little child,so education and work should be scarcely separable for the adult. Byclosing off the school and boxing up learning we have really smotherededucation. We are only just beginning to revive. We have first to makeover the school into a real child-community, filled with activitieswhich stimulate the child and focus his interest towards someconstructive work, and then we have to teach the teacher how to exposethe child to the various activities and guide his interest so that itwill be purposeful. The school ca