Indeed, a number of Dewey's major concerns as a philosopher and social educator are inherent in this insistence. Despite these three reminders of Dewey's limitations, his view of democracy as a social sphere charged with communication deserves attention.
Education as a Necessity of Life
Continuity of life means continuous adaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms. But as civilization progresses, the gap between the abilities of the young and the concerns of adults widens.
Education as a Social Function
The first job of the social body we call a school is to provide a simplified environment. The environment consists of the sum of the conditions associated with the performance of activities characteristic of a living being.
Education as Direction
However, we have explicitly added recognition of the role played in joint activity by the use of things. Basic control lies in the nature of the situations in which young people participate.
Education as Growth
The native mechanism of the child and its impulses all tend to facilitate social responsiveness. It is an active control of the environment through control of the action organs.
Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
According to Froebel, the active force is the representation of symbols, mostly mathematical, which correspond to the essential properties of the Absolute. It should be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life of humanity in general." Each in its time and place is absolutely necessary, as it is a stage in the process of self-realization of the absolute mind.
One of the two provided the question of knowledge and the object on which the mind should work. All that was required was to ensure adequate exercise of each of the powers. But the withdrawal changes the stimuli that work, tending to make them more in line with the needs of the organism.
It is merely a more explicit statement of the manner in which that sequential arrangement takes place.
Education as Conservative and Progressive
Mind formation is entirely a matter of presenting the right educational materials. This illustration can be applied to the entire range of education of any individual. It places the heritage from the past in proper relation to the demands and possibilities of the present.
Knowing the past and its legacy is of great importance when entering the present, but not otherwise. But, having turned his back on the present, there is no way to return to it loaded with the spoils of the past. It always has an immediate end, and insofar as the activity is educational, it reaches that end - the direct transformation of the quality of experience.
That is, it can be treated as a process of adapting the future to the past, or as a utilization of the past for a resource in an evolving future.
The Democratic Conception in Education
This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our
Plato's starting point is that the organization of society ultimately depends on the ultimate knowledge of existence. They become citizens-subjects of the state; her defenders in war; her inner guards at peace. However, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance of the movement.
If the mind was a wax board to be written on by objects, there was no limit to the possibility of education by means of the natural environment. To form the citizen and not the "man" became the goal of education.1 The historical situation referred to is the aftermath of Napoleon's conquests, especially in Germany. The reconciliation took the form of the perception of the "organic" nature of the state.
The social goal of upbringing and education was identified with the national goal, and the result was a distinct blurring of the meaning of the social goal.
Aims in Education
The wind blows around the desert sand; the position of the grains is changed. In the first place, it involves careful observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available to reach the end and to discover the obstacles in the way. It must be based on a consideration of what is already happening; on the resources and difficulties of the situation.
This requires revision of the original goal; it must be added and subtracted. Being deployed or imposed from the outside is not supposed to have a working relationship with the concrete conditions of the situation. As a first consequence, the teacher's intelligence is not free; it is limited to receiving the goals set from above.
This mistrust of the teacher's experience is then reflected in a lack of confidence in student responses.
Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
For since the simultaneity of the three types of education is necessary for their perfection,. a species that is completely independent of our control must necessarily regulate us in determining the other two.” In particular, he believes that there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous". development of domestic organs and abilities. He believes that this development can continue, regardless of what use they are intended for.
And the purpose of the social medium, as we've seen, is to drive growth by making the best possible use of powers. Consequently, the development of the former provides the yardstick to which the latter must be subordinated. The irregularity of growth and its meaning is indicated in the following passage by a student on the growth of the nervous system.
We have an unconscious revival of the defects of the Platonic scheme without its enlightened method of selection.
Interest and Discipline
Your view is forward-looking and you take care to consider existing facts because and to the extent that they are factors in achieving the desired result. Returning to the case where the mind is not concerned with the physical manipulation of the instruments but with what we intend to write, the case is the same. The opposite of isolating the mind from object-oriented activities to achieve goals is isolating the object to be learned.
Later on, a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning of the subject matter. People's fundamental attitudes toward the world are determined by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they participate. As a result, the intelligence of those who control the practice is not liberal.
Instead of playing free to subjugate the world for human ends, it is devoted to the manipulation of other humans for ends that are as non-human as they are exclusionary.
Experience and Thinking
The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (despite the generally intrusive and disruptive nature of the body in mental action) more or less must be used. A chariot is not perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the parts that makes it a carriage. Thinking thus corresponds to an explicit representation of the intelligent element in our experience.
To think about the influence of the event on what may be, but is not yet, is thinking. For the general in war, or an ordinary soldier, or a citizen of one of the warring nations, the stimulus to think is immediate and urgent. Equipment is arranged; an expedition may be undertaken to a distant part of the globe.
Separating the active becoming phase from the passing passive phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience.
Thinking in Education
The initial stage of that developing experience which is called thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a
These are two ways of getting to the same point: Is experience a personal matter of such a nature that it itself encourages and directly observes the connections involved and leads to inference and its testing. The physical equipment and arrangement of the average school room are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience. Many of these are not even comparable to the questions that may arise to a boy or girl in conversation with others or reading books outside of school.
No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of school (so that they pester adults if given any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of showing curiosity about the subject during school hours. No amount of improvement in the instructor's personal technique will completely remedy this condition. The student studies, but unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school system and the school authority, not the nominal "studies".
The relative proportion to be gained from each is a matter of the specific features of the problem in question.
The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured
The point is that no thought, no idea can be transferred as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, to the one to whom it is told, another given is a fact, not an idea. However, it is not easy to provide conditions that will equate the creation of an idea with an experience that expands and more precisely our contact with the environment.
Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment it should; it is not fertilized by learning in school. If we dwell especially on the negative side, it is for the sake of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effective development of thought. If they enter at all, it is like a concession to the material needs of the masses.
It is not subject to the refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and extensive material of direct instruction.
The Nature of Method
It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative terms than in positive ones. Self-
A self-aware person thinks partly about his problem and partly about what others think of his actions. It is a sign of a whole-soul relationship between a person and what he is dealing with. It is sometimes the easiest way to correct a false method of approach, and to improve the efficiency of the means one uses,—.
When it is effective, a person thinks of himself in terms of what needs to be done, as one means, among other things, the realization of an end - as in the case of a tennis player who trains to get the. In abnormal cases one thinks of oneself not as part of the agencies of execution, but as a separate object - as when the player assumes a stance thinking about the impression it will make on spectators, or is concerned about the impression he fears. movements give rise to.
