Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of EducationDewey, John
Philosophy
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education
Dewey, John
Education -- Philosophy; Education -- Social aspects
The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable
experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities
which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the
strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are
inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an
external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture
which identifies it with something purely "inner." And the idea of
perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions.
What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with
others--which is not capable of free and full communication. What is
termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten
about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man
might have internally--and therefore exclusively. What one is as a
person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take
of intercourse. This transcends both the efficiency which consists
in supplying products to others and the culture which is an exclusive
refinement and polish.
Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value
to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently
worth while. Why then should it be thought that one must take his
choice between sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others,
or sacrificing them to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the
saving of his own soul or the building of an inner spiritual life and
personality? What happens is that since neither of these things is
persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries
each course by turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much
of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world
has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual
self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of
life. The dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for
that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time
to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal
culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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