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
At most he
learns simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new
points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual companionship.
Hence both teaching and learning tend to become conventional and
mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied.
As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or
less random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined or
specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student may
be in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are
confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes
and vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense
mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not
follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still have
to find their intellectual way about. And even with the adult, it does
not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. It marks an intermediate
period, capable of being lengthened with increased mastery of a
subject, but always coming between an earlier period of more general and
conspicuous organic action and a later time of putting to use what has
been apprehended.
When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body
in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of
obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom
which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which
what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If
attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order
to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take
care of itself. The individual who has a question which being really a
question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for
information that will help him cope with it, and who has at command
an equipment which will permit these interests to take effect, is
intellectually free. Whatever initiative and imaginative vision he
possesses will be called into play and control his impulses and habits.
His own purposes will direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming
attention, his docility, his memorizings and reproductions, will partake
of intellectual servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjection
is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not
expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the
few set in authority. It is not adapted to a society which intends to be
democratic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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