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
Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be
a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so
far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one
who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating,
with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it
be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward
your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and
ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be
communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as
another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with
the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch
phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's
experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.
All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that
any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared,
is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast
in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.
In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and
vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone
mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion
to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The
inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only
necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching
gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form
which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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