单项选择题

The essential weakness of the old and traditional education was not just that it emphasized the necessity for provision of definite subject-matter and activities. These things are necessities for anything that can rightly be called education. The weakness and evil was that the imagination of educators did not go beyond provision of a fixed and rigid environment of subject-matter, one drawn moreover from sources altogether too remote from the experiences of the pupil. What is needed in the new education is more attention, not less, to subject-matter and to progress in technique. But when I say more, I do not mean more in quantity of the same old kind. I mean an imaginative vision which sees that no prescribed and ready-made scheme can possibly determine the exact subject-matter that will best promote the educative growth of every individual young person; that every new individual sets a new problem ;that he calls for at least a somewhat different emphasis in subject-matter presented. There is nothing more blindly stupid than the convention which supposes that the matter actually contained in textbooks of arithmetic, history, geography, etc. , is just what will further the educational development of all children. 　　But withdrawal from the hard and fast and narrow contents of the old curriculum is only the negative side of the matter. If we do not go far in the positive direction of providing a body of subject-matter much richer, more varied and flexible, and also in truth more definite, judged in terms of the experience of those being educated, than traditional education supplied, we shall tend to leave an educational vacuum in which anything may happen. Complete isolation is impossible in nature. The young live in some environment whether we intend it or not , and this environment is constantly interacting with what children and youth bring to it. and the result is the shaping of their interests, minds and character―either educatively or mis-educatively. If the professed educator gives up his responsibility for judging and selecting the kind of environment that his best understanding leads him to think will be contributive to growth, then the young are left at the mercy of all the unorganized and casual forces of the modern social environment that inevitably play upon them as long as they live. In the educative environment the knowledge , judgment and experience of the teacher is a greater, not a smaller factor, than it is in the traditional school. The difference is that the teacher operates not as a judge set on high and marked by arbitrary authority but as a friendly co-partner and guide in a common enterprise. The author agitates reforms chiefly in the