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
There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually
both too much and too little information supplied by others. The
accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction
in recitation and examination is made too much of. "Knowledge," in
the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable
resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things.
Frequently it is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes
to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage
ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only
lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one
could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.
Pupils who have stored their "minds" with all kinds of material which
they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered
when they try to think. They have no practice in selecting what is
appropriate, and no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead
static level. On the other hand, it is quite open to question whether,
if information actually functioned in experience through use in
application to the student's own purposes, there would not be need of
more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually at
command.
III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful
observation and recollection determine what is given, what is already
there, and hence assured. They cannot furnish what is lacking. They
define, clarify, and locate the question; they cannot supply its answer.
Projection, invention, ingenuity, devising come in for that purpose. The
data arouse suggestions, and only by reference to the specific data can
we pass upon the appropriateness of the suggestions. But the suggestions
run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They forecast
possible results, things to do, not facts (things already done).
Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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