Preface
Chapter 1 Education as a Necessity of Life
Chapter 2 Education as a Social Function
Chapter 3 Education as Direction
Chapter 4 Education as Growth
Chapter 5 Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal
Discipline
Chapter 6 Education as Conservative and
Progressive
Chapter 7 The Democratic Conception in
Education
Chapter 8 Aims in Education
Chapter 9 Natural Development and Social
Efficiency as Aims
Chapter 10 Interest and Discipline
Chapter 11 Experience and Thinking
Chapter 12 Thinking in Education
Chapter 13 The Nature of Method
Chapter 14 The Nature of Subject Matter
Chapter 15 Play and Work in the Curriculum
Chapter 16 The Significance of Geography and
History
Chapter 17 Science in the Course of Study
Chapter 18 Educational Values
Chapter 19 Labor and Leisure
Chapter 20 Intellectual and Practical
Studies
Chapter 21 Physical and Social Studies:
Naturalism and Humanism
Chapter 22 The Individual and the World
Chapter 23 Vocational Aspects of Education
Chapter 24 Philosophy of Education
Chapter 25 Theories of Knowledge
Chapter 26 Theories of Morals
內容試閱：
1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The
most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former
maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance
is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged.
Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to
react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so
as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While
the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less
tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further
existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces at
least in the higher forms of life, but loses its identity as a living thing.
As long as it endures, it struggles to use
surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the
material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into
means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends
in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the
return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word control in this sense, it
may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own
continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a
self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
In all the higher forms this process cannot
be kept up indefinitely. After a while they succumb; they die. The creature is
not equal to the task of indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life
process is not dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one
individual. Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous sequence.
And though, as the geological record shows, not merely individuals but also
species die out, the life process continues in increasingly complex forms. As
some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against
which they struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life means
continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.
We have been speaking of life in its lowest
terms as a physical thing. But we use the word life to denote the whole
range of experience, individual and racial. When we see a book called The Life
of Lincoln we do not expect to find within its covers a treatise on physiology.
We look for an account of social antecedents; a description of early
surroundings, of the conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief
episodes in the development of character; of signal struggles and achievements;
of the individuals hopes, tastes, joys and sufferings. In precisely similar
fashion we speak of the life of a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of the
American nation. Life covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and
defeats, recreations and occupations.
We employ the word experience in the same
pregnant sense. And to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense,
the principle of continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of
physical existence goes, in the case of human beings, the recreation of
beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any
experience, through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact. Education,
in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every
one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a
savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or
social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the
life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group
goes on.
The primary ineluctable facts of the birth
and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine
the necessity of education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the
immaturity of the new-born members of the group its future sole
representatives and the maturity of the adult members who possess the
knowledge and customs of the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity
that these immature members be not merely physically preserved in adequate
numbers, but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information,
skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its
characteristic life. Even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far
beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves.
With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original capacities of the
immature and the standards and customs of the elders increases. Mere physical
growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not
suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of
thoughtful pains are required. Beings who are born not only unaware of, but
quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be
rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education
alone, spans the gap.
Society exists through a process of
transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by
means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older
to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations,
standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the
group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If
the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the
new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather
than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.
If a plague carried off the members of a
society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done
for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an
epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that
some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and
practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not
automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission
takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into
savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature that if they were left to
themselves without the guidance and succor of others, they could not even
acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The young
of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many
of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation
have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with
respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements
of humanity!
2. Education and Communication. So
obvious, indeed, is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued
existence of a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But
justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us
away from an unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are,
indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions
of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a
relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the necessity of more
fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we make sure of placing the
scholastic methods in their true context.
Society not only continues to exist by
transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in
transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the
words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue
of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which
they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order
to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge a
common understanding like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such things
cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; they cannot be
shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces. The
communication which insures participation in a common understanding is one
which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions like ways of
responding to expectations and requirements.
Persons do not become a society by living in
physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by
being so many feet or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may
institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands
of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.
Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work for a
common end. The parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a
common result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all
cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they regulated
their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a community. But
this would involve communication. Each would have to know what the other was
about and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his
own purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.
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