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
thinks it is succeeding--in getting a preparation for the future.
Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a
large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The
future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to
be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely
systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems
which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a
future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this
method, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of
information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that
pupils may be fooled into taking something which they do not care for.
It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with
later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd
moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment,
in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the
present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of
the present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching
importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the
mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation for a
continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy
should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant
as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the
future is taken care of.
2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back
with one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived
not as continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward
a definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,--perfection.
Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an
unfolding toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the
preparation theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of
the latter make much of the practical and professional duties for which
one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal
and spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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