Module 2-1 -122The idea of making provision in the home, in the school,
and in the community for helping the child to acquire interests best suited to the kind of person he is, gives new meaning to the role of interests in education. According to this conception, we will not simply utilize the interests a child happens to have acquired as a guide to what and how to teach. We will look upon interests not primarily as aids or guides to learning but as forms of experience through which the child discovers and realizes the resources of his nature.
Viewed in this light, interests are more than a cluster
of favored activities. They represent, in the aggregate, modes of life in which the child's emotional well-being and his social relations are deeply involved. Through the process of developing interests that are in keeping with his particular qualities and abilities the child is helped to acquire a conception of himself that is in line with reality. Through this process he probably also can be helped to acquire a wholesome idea of his own worth. Such interests also can be the medium through which he is helped to find a place in his social environment that is comfortable to him and to others. For it is by way of common interests that people establish many of their social contacts and fulfill many of their social needs, whether by temperament they tend to be very gregarious or very selective in their relations with others.
This view of the role of interest underscores the importance of making provision in the educational program for a variety of interests in order to take account of the fact that children differ so markedly in their make-up. Only by this means can the diversities of human nature come into their own and only thus can the individual youngster, with abilities that may be of high or low degree, learn to make the most satisfactory use of his talents, whether these are equally proportioned or whether his greater strength happens to be in mental tasks or in a form of manual dexterity, in a creative art, or in some other endeavor. Variety of opportunity is needed not only to enable children to develop interests in keeping with the kinds and levels of their abilities, but also to enable them to pursue such interests at a pace and with an intensity suited to their temperament.
It may also be added that when there is provision that may enable each child most fully to express himself, it probably also will be true that the child will be able better to bear the frustrations that all children meet. He will also have more opportunity for the kind of success that a person such as he can achieve, and he will be less at the mercy of failure in the face of arbitrary standards imposed from without.