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
(iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in France,
English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals
in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued from isolated
streams of consciousness. Legal arrangements, especially penal
administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as to
prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private
sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. Education was
to instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others
and some degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary for
security in the pursuit of one's own happiness. Chief emphasis was
put, however, upon trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one into
harmony with that of others. In commerce, each aims at the satisfaction
of his own wants, but can gain his own profit only by furnishing some
commodity or service to another. Thus in aiming at the increase of his
own private pleasurable states of consciousness, he contributes to
the consciousness of others. Again there is no doubt that this view
expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the values of
conscious life, and a recognition that institutional arrangements
are ultimately to be judged by the contributions which they make to
intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious experience. It also
did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices from the
contempt in which they had been held in communities founded upon the
control of a leisure class. In both ways, this philosophy promoted a
wider and more democratic social concern. But it was tainted by
the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine that every
individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and pains, and
that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect ways
of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other words, it made
explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental
life a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and
readapt common concerns. It made union among men a matter of calculation
of externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle
that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only
a "cash nexus" among men. The educational equivalents of this doctrine
in the uses made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only
too obvious. (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path.
It started from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of
Descartes and his French successors. But while French thought upon
the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious
conception of a divine mind residing in individuals, German thought (as
in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two. Reason is absolute. Nature is
incarnate reason. History is reason in its progressive unfolding in
man. An individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself
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