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Willingness to work for ends by means of acts not
naturally attractive is best attained by securing
such an appreciation of the value of the end that a
sense of its value is transferred to its means of
accomplishment. Not interesting in themselves, they
borrow interest from the result with which they are
associated. (218)
This “value” is “conjoint free mental play and thoughtfulness”
(219) - the marriage of “pure interest in truth” and the “love
of the free play of thought” - which is so natural to children
but is often lost upon maturity because of the pressure of
“social conditions.” For Dewey, it is the work of the teacher
to stimulate his or her students to pursue such “value” in those
“materials and occupations” put before them. To do this, to
stimulate the “enrichment of the present for its own sake
[which] is the just heritage of childhood and the best insurer
of future growth” (219), is to stimulate wonder, that thing I
sought out in my own writing when I too was a child and then,
years later, when I began working to become a teacher of
writing.
And now that I have explored those portraits of the
dialectical opposition of Uncertainty and Certainty as offered,
whether explicitly or implicitly, through the educational
philosophy of John Dewey and the research study of William
Perry, I would now turn to me: my very own attempts to realize
this theoretical purpose and the “potential” and “promise”
therein in the writing classes I have taught over the years. I
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