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
and imposed merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience
to find out what nature was like. Appeal to experience marked the breach
with authority. It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness
in discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and
systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the
relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over
them by preconceived ideas.
The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it
had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing
and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and
cognitive. It meant the apprehension of material which should ballast
and check the exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic
empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as
a way of knowing. The only question was how good a way it is. The
result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost
exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. Practice was not
so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or
aftermath of knowledge. The educational result was only to confirm the
exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be
brought in for purely utilitarian ends--the acquisition by drill of
certain habits. In the second place, the interest in experience as a
means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more truly
objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a hand, so
to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate
true knowledge--to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of
receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were
generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of
sensationalism--that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge
with the reception and association of sensory impressions. In
John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we find this
sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties,
like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and
generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account,
such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See
ante, p. 61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the
limit; they regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations
made in us by the conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held
that the mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing
engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas
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