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
It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything
which would stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis
must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human
pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary
and provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the
fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all
human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition
of mind. If these applications seem to be remote from a consideration
of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning
of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately
grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education
as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to
social aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be
inconsistently applied.
Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds
of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to
measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the
interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness
and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable
society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up
barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society
which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its
institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated
life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of
education which gives individuals a personal interest in social
relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure
social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical historic
philosophies of education were considered from this point of view.
The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that
stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class
rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism
of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve the notion
of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was
to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development
of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The
institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied
this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing
narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of
the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination
of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain
in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
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