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 this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
presented) is creative,--an incursion into the novel. It involves some
inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some
context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light
in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton
thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his
thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of
them commonplaces--sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of
numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were
put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is true of
every striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every
admirable artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative
originality with the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize
that its measure lies in putting everyday things to uses which had not
occurred to others. The operation is novel, not the materials out of
which it is constructed.
The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
original in a projection of considerations which have not been
previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be
done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting
five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though
everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of
experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a
new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has
for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of
intellectual constructiveness--of creativeness, if the word may be used
without misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned
to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of
a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense
of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into
them; nor that it would be possible to give even children and youth the
delights of personal intellectual productiveness--true and important
as are these things. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it
is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The
communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for
himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual
interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he
directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions
of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does
he think. When the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which
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