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
This situation in education represents the divisions and separations
which obtain in social life. The variety of interests which should mark
any rich and balanced experience have been torn asunder and deposited in
separate institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods.
Business is business, science is science, art is art, politics is
politics, social intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals,
recreation is recreation, and so on. Each possesses a separate and
independent province with its own peculiar aims and ways of proceeding.
Each contributes to the others only externally and accidentally. All of
them together make up the whole of life by just apposition and addition.
What does one expect from business save that it should furnish money,
to be used in turn for making more money and for support of self and
family, for buying books and pictures, tickets to concerts which may
afford culture, and for paying taxes, charitable gifts and other things
of social and ethical value? How unreasonable to expect that the pursuit
of business should be itself a culture of the imagination, in breadth
and refinement; that it should directly, and not through the money which
it supplies, have social service for its animating principle and be
conducted as an enterprise in behalf of social organization! The same
thing is to be said, mutatis mutandis, of the pursuit of art or science
or politics or religion. Each has become specialized not merely in
its appliances and its demands upon time, but in its aim and animating
spirit. Unconsciously, our course of studies and our theories of the
educational values of studies reflect this division of interests. The
point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the unity or
integrity of experience. How shall it be full and varied without losing
unity of spirit? How shall it be one and yet not narrow and monotonous
in its unity? Ultimately, the question of values and a standard of
values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of
life. Educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools,
materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and
richness of experience. How shall we secure breadth of outlook without
sacrificing efficiency of execution? How shall we secure the diversity
of interests, without paying the price of isolation? How shall the
individual be rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the
cost of his intelligence? How shall art, science, and politics reinforce
one another in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends
pursued at one another's expense? How can the interests of life and the
studies which enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead
of dividing men from one another? With the questions of reorganization
thus suggested, we shall be concerned in the concluding chapters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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