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
But the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already
developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized
on the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to
one another--not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily
movements, and friends. To the one who is learned, subject matter is
extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. To the
one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through
his personal occupations. 1 The problem of teaching is to keep the
experience of the student moving in the direction of what the expert
already knows. Hence the need that the teacher know both subject matter
and the characteristic needs and capacities of the student.
2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is possible,
without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical
stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner.
In its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent
ability--power to do. This kind of subject matter, or known material, is
expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. Then this material
gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or
information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into rationally or
logically organized material--that of the one who, relatively speaking,
is expert in the subject.
I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most
deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read,
write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a
horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular
tendency to regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a
sort of miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the
strong tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action
with knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic
conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically
formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial
subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving
the use of the body and the handling of material, the subject matter of
instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and
so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
Recognition of the natural course of development, on the contrary,
always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. Arts
and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding
as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends.
Popular terms denoting knowledge have always retained the connection
with ability in action lost by academic philosophies. Ken and can are
allied words. Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
affection and of looking out for its welfare. Mind means carrying out
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