Are
political parties with differing aims, social
sets, clicks gangs corporation partnerships groups bound closely together by
tiers of blood and so on in endless variety
in many modern states and ancient there is great diversity of
populations, of varying languages, religions, moral code, and traditions. From
this stand point, many and minor political units, one of our large cities, for
example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclusive
permeating community of action or thought .(See ante p 20 )
The term society,
community, is thus ambiguous. They have both a eulogistic or normative sense
and descriptive sense.’ a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto .In social
philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is
conceived as one by its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity,
praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends,
mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the
tern denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we
find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded together
in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregation that prey upon the public while
serving it, political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are
included if interests as a factor in social control. The second mean not only
freer interaction between social groups (once isolated do far as intention
could keep us a separation) but change in social habit – its continuous
readjustment through meeting the new situation produced by varied intercourse.
And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically
constituted society. Upon the educational side, we note first that the
realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually
interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important
consideration, make a democratic community more interested than other
communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. The
devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial
explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be
successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated.
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it
must find the substitute voluntary disposition and interest; these can be
created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is
more than a form of government: it is primarily a mode of associated living, of
conjoint communicated experience. The following nature was a political dogma.
It meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals
(See ante, p. 91). Rousseau’s statement that everything is good as it comes
from the hands of the creator has its signification only in its contrast with
the concluding part of the same sentence: “Everything degenerates in the hands
of man.” And again he says: “Natural man has an absolute value; he is a numeral
unit, a compete integer and has no relation save to himself and to his fellow
man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose
value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the integral body of society.
Good political institution is those which make a man unnatural.” It is upon
this conception of the artificial.” It is upon this conception of the
artificial and harmful character of organized social life as it now exists 2
that he rested the notation that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which
initiate growth but also its plan and goal. That evil institution and customs
work almost automatically to give a wrong education which the most careful
schooling cannot offset is true enough; but the conclusion is not to education
apart from the environment, but to provide an environment in which native
powers will be put to better users.
2. Social Efficiency
as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the end of a true education and
society the end of an evil one, could hardly
intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy
term .A society marked off into classes need he specially attentive only to the
education of its ruling elements. A
society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a
change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to
personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by
the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they
do not perceive. The result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate
to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of
others.
3. The
Platonic Educational philosophy. Subsequent chapter will be devoted to making
explicit the implication of the democratic ideas in education. In the remaining
potions of this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have
been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education of education
was especially conspicuous. The first one to be considered it that of Plato. No
one could better express than did he the fact that a society is stably
organized when each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by
nature in such a way as to be useful to others (or to contribute to the whole
to which he belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover
these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use. assimilation of
new presentations, their character is all important. The effect of new
presentations is reinforce groupings previously formed. The business of the
educator is, first, to select the proper material in order to fix the nature of
the original reaction, and, secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent
presentations on the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transaction.
The control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding
conception, in the ultimate goal.
(3) Certain
formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down. Presentation of new
subject matter is obviously the central thing. But since knowing consists in
the way in which this interacts with the contents already submerged below
consciousness, the first thing is the step of “preparation,”—that is. Calling
into special activity and getting above the floor of consciousness those older
presentation which are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation,
follow the processes of interaction of the new and odd; than comes the
application of the newly formed content
to the performance of some task. Everything must go through this course;
consequently there is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in all subjects
for all pupils of all ages.
Herbart’s great service lay in taking
the work of teaching out of the region of routine and accident. control. To say
that one knows what he is about, or can intent certain consequences, is to say
of course, that he can better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can,
therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial
consequence and avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then,
one in which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a capricious
activity on the other.(a) In the latter
one “does not care what happens”; one just lets himself go and avoids
connecting the consequence of one’s act ( the evidences of its connections with
other things) with the act. It is customary to frown upon such aimless random
activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness. But
there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the youth’s
own disposition, isolated from everything else. But in fact such activity is
explosive, and due to maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals acts
capriciously when ever they act under external dictation, or from being
told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing of the
deed upon others acts. One may learn by doing something which he does not
understand; even in the most intelligent
action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest portion of the connections
of the act we consciously intend are not perceived or anticipated. But we learn
only Now for that of discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means
and obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and
persistence are required. It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday
meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist
and endure in a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary solicitations.
A man of strong will, in the popular usage of the worlds, is a man who is
neither fickle nor half-hearted in achieving chosen ends, His ability is
exclusive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or
carry out his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
Clearly there are two
factors in will. One has to do with the foresight of results, the other with
the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has upon the person.
(1)Obstinacy
is persistence but it is not strength of violation .Obstinacy may be mere
animal inertia and insensitiveness .A man keeps on doing a thing just because
he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact,
the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his
refusal ) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling
that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be
worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even more in external; they are shifting
things about .No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect,
accompanies them. Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its
external adornment and display. Many of our existing social activities,
industrial and political, fall in these two classes .Neither the people who
engage in them ,nor those who are directly affected by them, are capable of
full and free interest in their work. Because of the lack of any purpose in the
work for the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim,
intelligence is not adequately engaged. The same condition force many people
back upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and
fancies. They are aesthetic but not artistic, since their feelings and ideas
are turned upon themselves ,instead of being method in acts which modify
conditions. Their mental life is sentimental ; an enjoyment of an inner
landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge from the
hard conditions of life --- not a temporary retreat for the sake of
recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. The very word
art may become associated not with specific transformation of things, making
them more significant for mind, but with stimulations of eccentric fancy and
with emotional indulgences. The separation and mutual contempt of the
“practical” man and the man of theory or culture, the divorce of fine and
industrial arts, are indication of this situation.
Only get rid
of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
Education in accord with nature was thought to
be the first step in insuring this more social society .It was plainly seen
that economic and political limitation was ultimately dependent upon limitation
of thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains was
to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. What
was called social life, existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to be
in trusted with this work. How could it be expected to undertake it when the
undertaking meant its own destruction? “Nature” must then then be the power to
which the enterprise was to be left .Even the extreme sensationalistic theory
of knowledge which was current derived itself from this conception. To insist
that mind is originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the
possibilities of education .If the mind was a wax table to be written upon by objects,
there were no limits to the possibility of education by means of natural environment
.And since the natural world of object is a scene of harmonious “truth,” this
education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.
5. Education
as National and as Social .As soon as the first enthusiasm for freedom waned;
the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side became obvious. Merely to
leave everything to ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous
thing anyway. Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the
event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each element;
the way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up
what is furnished and utilize it for some other stage ,until we arrive at the end,
which, as it where, summarizes and
finishes off the process .Since aims relate always to results, the first thing
to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether the work assigned possess intrinsic
continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and
then another? To talk about an educational aim when approximately each act of a
pupil is dictated by the teacher,when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from
the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk
nonsense .It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous
action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies and orderly
and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive
completing of a process. Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the
time succession, an aim mean foresight in advance of the end or possible
termination .If bees anticipated the conquences of their activity, if they
perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary
element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense thoroughgoing “disciplinary”
subordination to existing institution. The extent of the transformation of
educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied by
the struggle against Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from
Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual- cosmopolitan ideal. In his
treatise on Pedagogic, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the
eighteen century, he defines education as the process by which man becomes man.
Mankind begins its history submerged in nature—not as Man who is a creature of
reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite .Nature offers simply
the germs which education is to develop
and perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create
himself by his own voluntary efforts ;he has to make himself a truly moral,
rational, and free being .This creative effort is carried on by the educational
activities of slow generations. Its
acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their successors
not for the existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future
better humanity. But there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined
to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a
view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible
realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so they get
on; princes educate reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than
it does ends which present themselves than it doeskin persistence and energy in
use if mean to achieve the end. The really executive man is man who ponders his
ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full as
possible. The people we called weak-willed as to the consequences of their acts.
They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances.
When they begin to show themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being
thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action.
That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual,
consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which
consequences are though out, cannot be over-emphasized.
(ii) There
is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of result. Ends are
then foreseen, they are something to look at and for curiosity to play with
rather than something to achieve. There is or such thing as over intellectuality.
A person “takes it out” as we say in considering the consequences of proposed
prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in action.
And most situation if human intercourse. On the one hand, science commerce, and
art transcend national boundries.They are largely international in quality and method.
They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the people inhabiting
different countries. At the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has
never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Each nation
lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war with its neighbors.
Each is supposed to be the supreme as matter of courses that each has interests
which are exclusively its own. To question this is to question the very idea of
national sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice and
political science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the
wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower
sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts
of educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning of “social” as a function
and test of education than has yet been attained .Is it possible for an
educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social
ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted?
Internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to present economic
condition, which split society into classes some of which are made merely tools
for the higher indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is
centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of your
occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note the existing
facts because and in so far as they are factors in the achievement if the
result intended. You have to find out
what your resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the
difficulties and obstacles are. This foresight and this survy with reference to
what is foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen constitute
mind. Action that does not involve such a forecaster of results and such an
examination of means and hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is
blind. In neither case is it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what
is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to
be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
If we recur
to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical manipulation of the
instruments but with what one intends to write, the case is the same. There is
an activity in process; one is taken up with the development of a theme. Unless
one writes as a phonograph talks, this mean intelligence; namely , alertness in foreseeing the various
conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending, together with continually renewed observation and
recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusion
to be reached.
The account
of education given in our earlier chapter virtually anticipated the results
reached in a discussion of the purport of education in a democratic community.
For it assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue
their education---or that the object and reward of learning is continued
capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a
society except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of
social habits and institution by mean of wide stimulation arising from
equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our
search habit and institution by mean of wide stimulation arising from equitably
distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search for
aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding and end
outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate. We are
rather concerned with the contrast which exits when aims belongs within the
process in which they operate and when they are set up from without. And the
latter state of affairs must obtain when social relationship are not equitably
balanced. For in that case, some portioned of the whole social group will find
their aims determined by an external dictation of their own experience, and
their nominal aims will means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly
their own.
Combinations
of the two. Subject matter is then regarded as something complete in itself; it
is just something to be learned or known, either by the voluntary application
it makes on mind.
The facts of
interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind appears in experience
as ability to respond to present stimuli on the basics of anticipation of
future possible consequences, and with a view to controlling the things, the
subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a bearing
upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting or retarding it. These
statements are too formal to be very intelligible. An illustration may clear up
their significance. You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a
typewriter. If you are an expert, you formed habits take care if the physical
movements and leave your thoughts free to consider your topic. You then have to
use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the key at random and let the
consequences be what they may; you wish to record certain words in a given
order so as or make sense. You attend to the keys, to what you have written, to
your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine. You attention is
not distributed because after the act performed we note result which we had not
noted before. But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils
are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led
to see the connection between the result –say the answer—and the method pursued.
So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle.
Such action is essentially capricious, and lead to capricious habits. (b)
Routine action, action which is automatic, may increase skill to do a
particular thing. In so far, it might be said to have an educative effect. But
it does not lead to new perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits
rather that widens the meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and
our way of acting has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced
connection with things, and isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous
at some critical moment. The vaunted “skill” turns out gross ineptitude.
The
essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous reconstruction with
the order one-sided conceptions which have been criticized in this and the
previous chapter is that it identifies the end (the result) and the process.
This is verbally that experience as as active process occupies time and that
its later period completes its earlier portion; it brings to light connection,
But the idea which underlines it is that education is essentially
retrospective; that it look primarily to the past and especially to the
literary products of the past and especially to the literary products of the
past, and that mind is adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned
upon the spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense upon
higher instruction especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme
formation.
In the first place, its biological
basis is fallacious.Embyronic growth of the human infant preserves, without
doubt, some of the traits infant preserves, without doubt, some of the trait of
lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of past
stages. If there were any strict “law” of repetition, evolutionary development
would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation would simply have
repeated its processors’ existence. Development, in short, has taken place by
the entrance of shortcuts and alteration in the prior scheme of growth. And this
suggests that the aim of education is to facilitate such short –circuited
growth. The great advantages of immaturity, educationally speaking, are that it
enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown
past. The business of education is rather a liberate the young from reviving
and retroversion the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The
social environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action of
the habit of thinking there is a disposition to take consideration which are
dear to the heats of adults and set up as ends irrespective of the capacities
if those educated. There is also an inclination to propound aims which are so
uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirement of an individual,
forgetting that all learning is something which happen to an individual at a
given time and place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of great
value of perception of the adult is of great value in observing of the adult is
of great value in observing abilities and weakness of the young, in deciding
what they may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities if the adult exhibit what
certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the adult
achievements we should be without assurance as to significance of the drawing,
reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood. So if it were not for
adult language, we should not be able to see the import for the babbling
impulses of infancy. (2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of
cooperating with the activities of this undergoing instruction. It must suggest
the kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
And it is
well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only person,
parents, and teachers, etc.., have aims, not an abstract like education. And
consequently their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different
children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the
part of the one who teaches. Even the most valid aims which can put in words
will, as words, do more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not
aim, but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look
ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the
concrete situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has said:
“To lead this boy to read Scott’s novels instead o old Sleuth’s stories; to
teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from john’s make-up;
to prepare this class to study medicine,--these are sample of the millions of
aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education.”Bearing these
qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some of the characteristics
found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded upon
the intrinsic activities and needs
(including original instincts and acquired habits) of the given
individual to be educated. The tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as we
have sent, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment
or responsibility. In general,
Adequate
interplay of experience –the more action tends to become routine on the part of
the class at disadvantages, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part
of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as
one on who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This
condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is
found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but
whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is
said about scientific management of work. Aid is a narrow view which restricts
the science which secures efficiency of operation to movement of the muscles.
The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the relations of a man to
his work –including his relations to others who take part--- which will enlist
his intelligent interest in what he is doing. Efficiency in production often
demands division of labor. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless
workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in
what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by
such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of activity and
scientific management to purely technical externals is evidence of the
one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry—those
who supply its aims. Parents and teachers often complain and correctly—that
children “do not want to hear, or want to understand.” Their minds are not upon
the subject precisely because it does not tour them; it does not enter into
their concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be remedied, but the
remedy is not in use of method which increases indifference and aversion. Even
punishing a child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that
the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of arousing
“interest,” or bringing about a sense of connection. In the long run, its value
is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical recitation to act in way
desired by the adult or whether it leads the child “to think” – that is, to
reflect upon his act and impregnate them with aims.
(ii) That
interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more obvious for
executive persistence is even more obvious. Employers do not advertise for
workmen who are not interested in what they are doing. If one were engaging a
lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that the person
engaged would stick to his work more conscientiously it was so uncongenial to
him that he did it merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures—or
rather is – the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving
one to act for its realization.
2. The
Importance of the idea of interest in to it laden with the spoils of the past.
A mind that is adequate sensitive to the needs an occasions of the present
actually will have the liveliest of motives for interest in the background of
the present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it will never
have lost connection.
3. Education
as reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latest
powers from within, and of the formation from without, whether by physical
nature or by the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in
the conception that education is constant reorganizing or reconstructing of
experience. It has all the time an immediate of experience .It has all the time
an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end—the
direct transformation of the quality of experience. Infancy, youth , adult life
,-- all stand on the same educative level in the sender that what us really
learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience,
and in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point make
living thus contribute to an enrichment to its own perceptible meaning.
We thus a
technical definition of education: it is that reconstruction or reorganization
of experience, and which increase ability to direct the course of subsequent
experience. (1) The increment of
meaning corresponds to the increased perception of the much which has been said
so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But
condition which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these
ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality
of activities conception of the indefinite plurality of activities which may
characterize and individual and a social group, and consequently limited his
view to a limited number of class’s capacities and of social arrangement.
Plato’s starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately
upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be
at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we
shall have no criterion for nationally deciding what the possibilities are
which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We
shall have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities
--- what he called justice--- as a trait of both individual and social organization.
But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? In
dealing with the question we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that
such knowledge is not order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled
by false valuation and false perspective. Under such conditions it is
impossible for the individual to attain consistency importance of what has been
taught consists in its availability for further teaching; reflect the pedagogue’s
view of life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in
instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning. It
emphasizes the influence of intellection environment upon the mind; it slurs
over the fact that the environment involves a personal sharing in common
experience. It exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of consciously
formulated and used method, and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious,
attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the
operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief,
everything educational into account save its essence,-- vital energy seeking
opportunity for effective exercise. All education form character, mental and
moral. But formation consists in the section and coordination of native
activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social
environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a formation of native activities,
but it takes place through them. It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.
2. Education
as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar combination of the ideas of
development and formation from without has given rise to the recapitulation
theory of education, biological and cultural. The individual differences of endowment
the dynamic value of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them,
preferring irregularity to rounding out gained by pruning will most closely
follow that which takes place in the body and thus prove most effective.” 1
observation of natural tendencies is difficult under condition of restraint.
They show themselves most readily in a child’s spontaneous sayings and
doings,-- that is , in those he engages in when not put at se tasks and when
not fellow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural;
but it does follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be
taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable once have an environment
which keep them active and that their activity shall control the direction the
others take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to
nothing .Many tendencies that trouble parents when they appear are likely to be
transitory, and sometimes too much direct attention to them only fixes a
child’s attention upon them. At all events, adults too easily assume their own
habits and wishes as standards, and regard all deviations of children’s
impulses as evils to be eliminated. That artificiality, against which the
conception of following nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of
attempts to force children directly into the mold of grown-up standards.
Instead of
with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency.
Whether called culture is opposed to efficiency of personal qualities?
The fact is that the opposition of high
worth of personality to social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized
society with its rigid division of inferior and superior. The latter are
supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings;
the former are confined to providing external products. When social efficiency
as measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society,
it means characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried
over .But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social
return be demanded from all and lived in a dumb unsocial environment where men
refused to talk to one another and used that minimum gestures without which
they could not get along, vocal language would be as unachieved by him as if he
had no vocal organ. If the sound which he makes occurs in a medium of person
speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make like sound will be
selected and coordinated. This illustration may be applied to the entire range
of the heritage from the past in its right connection with the demands and
opportunities of the present.
(2) The
theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found in the
culture-product of pas age(either in general, or more specially in the
particular literatures which were produced in the culture epoch which is
supposed to correspond with the stage of development of those between the
process and product of growth which has been criticized. To keep the process
alive, to keep it the alive in the future, is the function of educational
subject matter. But an individual can lively in the present. The resend is not
just something which comes after the past; much less something produced by it .
It is what life in leaving the past behind it. The study of past product will
not help us understand the present , because the present is intelligence because, given ready-made, they
must be imposed by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the
latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means.
(2) We have
spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to attempt to realize them.
This impression must now be qualified. The aim as it first emerges is a mere
tentative sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If it
suffices to direct activity successful, nothing more is required, since its
whole function is to set a mark in advance ;and at times a mere hint may
suffice. But usually –at least in
complicated situations--- acting upon it brings to light conditions which had
been overlooked. This calls to and subtracted from. An aim must, then be
flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end
established externally to the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted
or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to
the concrete condition of the situation. What happen in the course of action
neither confirm, refutes upon. The failure that results from its lack of
adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the
fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances. The value of a
legitimate, on the contrary, lies involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later
outcomes thus reveal the meaning of the earlier while the experience as a whole
establishes a bent or disposition towards the things possessing this meaning.
Every such continuous experience or activity is educative, and all education resides
in having such experiences.
It remains
only to point out (what will receive more ample attention later) that the reconstruction
of experience may be social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification
we have spoke in the earlier chapter somewhat
we have spoken in the earlier chapter somewhat as if the education of
the immature which fills them with the spirits of the social group to which
they belong , were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitude and
resources of the adult group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance
of established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the main.
They endeavor to shape the experience of the young so that instead of
reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed and thus the future
adult society is an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation
of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious
social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills,
and see idea of the extent in which education may be an instrument of realizing
the……
