Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychologyDewey, John
Philosophy
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Dewey, John
Habit; Social psychology
The young are not as yet as subject to the full impact of established
customs. Their life of impulsive activity is vivid, flexible,
experimenting, curious. Adults have their habits formed, fixed, at least
comparatively. They are the subjects, not to say victims, of an
environment which they can directly change only by a maximum of effort
and disturbance. They may not be able to perceive clearly the needed
changes, or be willing to pay the price of effecting them. Yet they wish
a different life for the generation to come. In order to realize that
wish they may create a special environment whose main function is
education. In order that education of the young be efficacious in
inducing an improved society, it is not necessary for adults to have a
formulated definite ideal of some better state. An educational
enterprise conducted in this spirit would probably end merely in
substituting one rigidity for another. What is necessary is that habits
be formed which are more intelligent, more sensitively percipient, more
informed with foresight, more aware of what they are about, more direct
and sincere, more flexibly responsive than those now current. Then they
will meet their own problems and propose their own improvements.
Educative development of the young is not the only way in which the life
of impulse may be employed to effect social ameliorations, though it is
the least expensive and most orderly. No adult environment is all of one
piece. The more complex a culture is, the more certain it is to include
habits formed on differing, even conflicting patterns. Each custom may
be rigid, unintelligent in itself, and yet this rigidity may cause it to
wear upon others. The resulting attrition may release impulse for new
adventures. The present time is conspicuously a time of such internal
frictions and liberations. Social life seems chaotic, unorganized,
rather than too fixedly regimented. Political and legal institutions are
now inconsistent with the habits that dominate friendly intercourse,
science and art. Different institutions foster antagonistic impulses and
form contrary dispositions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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