502
PARTISAN REVIEW
knowledge but to inculcate a skill, as though school were an institution
for learning a handicraft.
In this process special importance was attached to obliterating
as far as possible the distinction between play and work-in favor
of the former. Play was looked upon as the liveliest and most ap–
propriate way for the child to behave in the world, as the only form
of activity that evolves spontaneously from his existence as a child.
Only what can be learned through play does justice to this live–
liness. The child's characteristic activity, so it was thought, lies in
play; learning in the old sense by forcing a child into an attitude of
passivity compelled him to give up his own playful initiative.
The close connection between these two things- the substitution
of doing for learning and of playing for working-is directly illustrated
by the teaching of languages: the child is to learn by speaking, that
is by doing, not by studying grammar and syntax; in other words
he is to learn a foreign language in the same way that as an infant
he learned his own language: as though at play and in the uninter–
rupted continuity of simple existence. Quite apart from the question
of whether this is possible or not-it is possible, to a limited degree,
only when one can keep the child all day long in the foreign-speaking
environment-it is perfectly clear that this procedure consciously at–
tempts to keep the older child as far as possible at the infant level.
The very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults,
the gradually acquired habit of work and of not-playing, is done away
with in favor of the independence of the world of childhood.
Whatever may be the connection between doing and knowing
or whatever the validity of the Pragmatic formula, its application
to education, that is, to the way the child learns, tends to make ab–
solute the world of childhood in just the same way that we noted
in the case of the first basic assumption. Here, too, under the pretext
of respecting the child's independence, he is debarred from the world
of_ grownups and artificially kept in his own, so far as that can be
called a world. This holding back of the child is artificial because it
breaks off the natural relationship between grownups and children,
which consists among other things in teaching and learning, and be–
cause at the same time it belies the fact that the child is a developing
human being, that childhood is a temporary stage, a preparation for
adulthood.
