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
it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary. It may be;
if so, it is the more important to face its bad intellectual effects.
Obvious is the loss of energy of thought immediately available when
one is consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one
matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously going out
to more congenial affairs. More subtle and more permanently crippling
to efficiency of intellectual activity is a fostering of habitual
self-deception, with the confused sense of reality which accompanies it.
A double standard of reality, one for our own private and more or less
concealed interests, and another for public and acknowledged concerns,
hampers, in most of us, integrity and completeness of mental action.
Equally serious is the fact that a split is set up between conscious
thought and attention and impulsive blind affection and desire.
Reflective dealings with the material of instruction is constrained
and half-hearted; attention wanders. The topics to which it wanders are
unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with them
are furtive. The discipline that comes from regulating response by
deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest
concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they
center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. They
enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. Not subject to
rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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