School educationMason, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Maria)
Philosophy
School education
Mason, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Maria)
Education -- Curricula; Education -- Philosophy
=Does not provide for the Evolution of the Person.=—Now let us bring
Locke up to the standard which we have erected, remembering always that
our power to raise a higher standard is due to him and such as he. There
is no unity of an inspiring idea, no natural progress and continuity, no
ennobling aim, in an education which stops at the knowledge a gentleman
should acquire and the accomplishments a gentleman should possess.
The _person_ hardly appears except in the way of the semi-mechanical
activities of his so-called faculties; he is practically the resultant of
the images conveyed through his senses. The _evolution_, the expansion of
the individual in the directions proper to him, has no place here; every
man is shut tight, as it were, in his own skin, but is taught to behave
himself becomingly within that limit. That intellectual commerce of
ideas whereby the dead yet speak their living thoughts in the work they
have left us, and by which as by links of an endless chain all men are
bound to each and all men influence each, has no place in a philosophy
which teaches that a man can know only through his own understanding
working upon the images he receives through his senses. In so far as we
wish to attain to the possibilities of the hour we must take farewell of
Locke, though we do so with gratitude, and even with affection.
=Modern Physiological-Psychology.=—The modern school, which regards
psychology strictly as a ‘natural science,’ works more or less on the
basis of Locke, plus an illuminating knowledge of biology. Here, as with
Locke, the ‘mind’ is apprehended only as ‘states of consciousness’; the
senses are the sole avenues of knowledge, which reaches the brain in the
form of ideas or images. But I shall represent this ‘rational psychology’
best by citing a few sentences from Professor James (Harvard University),
whose wise and temperate treatment of the subject commands the respect
and attention of even those who differ from him. He opens with a limiting
definition of psychology as the ‘_description and explanation of states
of consciousness as such_.’ He treats psychology as a ‘natural science.’
After bringing forward facts familiar to most of us, showing the intimate
connection between acts of thought and the cerebral hemisphere, he says:
“Taking all such facts together, the simple and radical conception
dawns upon the mind that mental action may be uniformly and absolutely
a function of brain action varying as the latter varies, and being to
the brain action as effect to cause. This conception is the working
hypothesis which underlies all the physiological-psychology of recent
years.” This is not far removed from the announcement of the Frenchman
that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, both
processes being purely material and mechanical, and doing away with any
requirement for the profoundest thinking beyond that of a well-nourished
brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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