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
On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an
intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in
its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with
man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with
his documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession
as the accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety
of ways, making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or
in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology
of literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the
imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of
children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily
degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself
on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.
Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life,
any study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and
greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The
humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow
in scope. Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian,
and negligible save as a possible enemy. Acute as were the social
observations and speculations of Greek thinkers, there is not a word in
their writings to indicate that Greek civilization was not self-inclosed
and self-sufficient. There was, apparently, no suspicion that its future
was at the mercy of the despised outsider. Within the Greek community,
the intense social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture
was based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom--classes
necessary to the existence of the state, as Aristotle declared, and
yet not genuine parts of it. The development of science has produced an
industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close
contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no
matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can
harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself. The
same revolution has abolished agricultural serfdom, and created a class
of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized political
rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in the control of
industry--claims which receive sympathetic attention from many among the
well-to-do, since they have been brought into closer connections with
the less fortunate classes through the breaking down of class barriers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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