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
in what was future for it, though not for the historian. To take it by
itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively.
Reflection also implies concern with the issue--a certain sympathetic
identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of
the course of events. For the general in the war, or a common soldier,
or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking
is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon
imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence
of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible
course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. If we cannot take
sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine
the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We
desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to the outcome does
not follow or think about what is happening at all. From this dependence
of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences
of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in
partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain
detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to
affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation
will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears may be
the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part of
an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in the
degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his observations and
reasonings. There is, however, no incompatibility between the fact that
the occasion of reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going
on and the fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's
self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving
this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where
the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is
designed to influence the result. Only gradually and with a widening of
the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking
develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of
great significance for education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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