24.
CHAPTER XXIV
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION:
1. A Critical Review.
—Although we are dealing with the philosophy of education, no
definition of philosophy has yet been given; nor has there been an
explicit consideration of the nature of a philosophy of education. This
topic is now introduced by a summary account of the logical order
implied in the previous discussions, for the purpose of bringing out the
philosophic issues involved. Afterwards we shall undertake a brief
discussion, in more specifically philosophical terms, of the theories of
knowledge and of morals implied in different educational ideals as they
operate in practice.
The prior chapters fall logically into three parts. I. The first
chapters deal with education as a social need and function. Their
purpose is to outline the general features of education as the process
by which social groups maintain their continuous existence. Education
was shown to be a process of renewal of the meanings of experience
through a process of transmission, partly incidental to the ordinary
companionship or intercourse of adults and youth, partly deliberately
instituted to effect social continuity. This process was seen to
involve control and growth of both the immature individual and the group
in which he lives.
This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account of the
quality of the social group concerned—the kind of society aiming
at its own perpetuation through education. The general discussion was
then specified by application to social groups which are intentionally
progressive, and which aim at a greater variety of mutually shared
interests in distinction from those which aim simply at the preservation
of established customs. Such societies were found to be democratic in
quality, because of the greater freedom allowed the constituent members,
and the conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously
socialized interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of customs
operating under the control of a superior class. The sort of education
appropriate to the development of a democratic community was then
explicitly taken as the criterion of the further, more detailed analysis
of education.
II. This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen to
imply the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of
experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or
social content, and as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as
directive guardians of this reorganization. (See Chapters VI-VII.) This
distinction was then used to outline the respective characters of
subject matter and method. It also defined their unity, since method in
study and learning upon this basis is just the consciously directed
movement of reorganization of the subject matter of experience. From
this point of view the main principles of method and subject matter of
learning were developed ( Chapters XIII-XIV. )
III. Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate principles
by force of contrast, this phase of the discussion took for granted the
democratic criterion and its application in present social life. In the
subsequent chapters ( XVIII-XXII ) we considered the present limitation
of its actual realization. They were found to spring from the notion
that experience consists of a variety of segregated domains, or
interests, each having its own independent value, material, and method,
each checking every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by
the others, forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education. We then
proceeded to an analysis of the various assumptions underlying this
segregation. On the practical side, they were found to have their cause
in the divisions of society into more or less rigidly marked-off classes
and groups—in other words, in obstruction to full and flexible
social interaction and intercourse. These social ruptures of continuity
were seen to have their intellectual formulation in various dualisms or
antitheses—such as that of labor and leisure, practical and
intellectual activity, man and nature, individuality and association,
culture and vocation. In this discussion, we found that these different
issues have their counterparts in formulations which have been made in
classic philosophic systems; and that they involve the chief problems of
philosophy—such as mind (or spirit) and matter, body and mind, the
mind and the world, the individual and his relationships to others, etc.
Underlying these various separations we found the fundamental assumption
to be an isolation of mind from activity involving physical conditions,
bodily organs, material appliances, and natural objects. Consequently,
there was indicated a philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and
function of mind in an activity which controls the environment. Thus we
have completed the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the first
portion of this book: such as the biological continuity of human
impulses and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the
growth of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common
purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the uses made
of it in the social medium; the necessity of utilization of individual
variations in desire and thinking for a progressively developing
society; the essential unity of method and subject matter; the intrinsic
continuity of ends and means; the recognition of mind as thinking which
perceives and tests the meanings of behavior. These conceptions are
consistent with the philosophy which sees intelligence to be the
purposive reorganization, through action, of the material of experience;
and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies
mentioned.
2. The Nature of Philosophy.
—Our further task is to extract and make explicit the idea of philosophy implicit
in these considerations. We have already virtually described, though not defined,
philosophy in terms of the problems with which it deals; and we have pointed out that
these problems originate in the conflicts and difficulties of social life. The problems
are such things as the relations of mind and matter ; body and soul; humanity and
physical nature; the individual and the social; theory —or knowing, and
practice— or doing. The philosophical systems which formulate these problems
record the main lineaments and difficulties of contemporary social practice. They bring
to explicit consciousness what men have come to think, in virtue of the quality of their
current experience, about nature, themselves, and the reality they conceive to include
or to govern both.
As we might expect, then, philosophy has generally been defined in ways which imply a
certain totality, generality, and ultimateness of both subject matter and method. With
respect to subject matter, philosophy is an attempt to comprehend—that is,
to gather together the varied details of the world and of life into a single inclusive
whole, which shall either be a unity, or, as in the dualistic systems, shall reduce the
plural details to a small number of ultimate principles. On the side of the attitude
of the philosopher and of those who accept his conclusions, there is the endeavor to
attain as unified, consistent, and complete an outlook upon experience as is possible.
This aspect is expressed in the word "philosophy",—love of wisdom. Whenever
philosophy has been taken seriously, it has always been assumed that it signified
achieving a wisdom which would influence the conduct of life. Witness the fact that
almost all ancient schools of philosophy were also organized ways of living, those who
accepted their tenets being committed to certain distinctive modes of conduct; witness
the intimate connection of philosophy with the theology of the Roman church in the
middle ages, its frequent association with religious interests, and, at national crises,
its association with political struggles.
This direct and intimate connection of philosophy with an outlook upon life obviously
differentiates philosophy from science. Particular facts and laws of science evidently
influence conduct. They suggest things to do and not do, and provide means of
execution. When science denotes not simply a report of the particular facts discovered
about the world but a general attitude toward it— as distinct from special
things to do —it merges into philosophy. For an underlying disposition represents
an attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known things, but to
the considerations which govern conduct.
Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject matter. For this
reason, the definition of such conceptions as generality, totality, and ultimateness is
most readily reached from the side of the disposition toward the world which they
connote. In any literal and quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject
matter of knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the question. The very
nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process forbids. In a less rigid sense,
they apply to science rather than to philosophy. For obviously it is to
mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, history, etc. that we must go,
not to philosophy, to find out the facts of the world. It is for the sciences to say
what generalizations are tenable about the world and what they specifically are. But
when we ask what sort of permanent disposition of action toward the world the
scientific disclosures exact of us we are raising a philosophic question.
From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless task of a
quantitative summation. It means rather consistency of mode of
response in reference to the plurality of events which occur. Consistency
does not mean literal identity; for since the same thing
does not happen twice, an exact repetition of a reaction involves some
maladjustment. Totality means continuity—the carrying on of a former
habit of action with the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and
growing. Instead of signifying a ready-made complete scheme of action,
it means keeping the balance in a multitude of diverse actions, so that
each borrows and gives significance to every other. Any person who is
open-minded and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has concentration
and responsibility in connecting them has, in so far, a philosophic
disposition. One of the popular senses of philosophy is calm and
endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it is even supposed to be
a power to bear pain without complaint. This meaning is a tribute to
the influence of the Stoic philosophy rather than an attribute of
philosophy in general. But in so far as it suggests that the wholeness
characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to extract meaning,
from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and to embody what
is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is justified in any
scheme. An analogous interpretation applies to the generality and
ultimateness of philosophy. Taken literally, they are absurd
pretensions; they indicate insanity. Finality does not mean, however,
that experience is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to
penetrate to deeper levels of meaning—to go below the surface and
find out the connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. In
like manner the philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it is
averse to taking anything as isolated; it tries to place an act in its
context—which constitutes its significance.
It is of assistance to connect philosophy with thinking in its
distinction from knowledge. Knowledge, grounded knowledge, is science;
it represents objects which have been settled, ordered, disposed of
rationally. Thinking, on the other hand, is prospective in reference.
It is occasioned by an unsettlement and it aims at overcoming a
disturbance. Philosophy is thinking what the known demands of
us—what responsive attitude it exacts. It is an idea of what is
possible, not a record of accomplished fact. Hence it is hypothetical,
like all thinking. It presents an assignment of something to be
done—something to be tried.
Its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be achieved only
in action) but in defining difficulties and suggesting methods for
dealing with them. Philosophy might almost be described as thinking
which has become conscious of itself—which has generalized its place,
function, and value in experience.
More specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises because
there is the need of integration in action of the conflicting various
interests in life. Where interests are so superficial that they glide
readily into one another, or where they are not sufficiently organized
to come into conflict with one another, the need for philosophy is not
perceptible. But when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the
religious, or the economic with the scientific or aæsthetic, or when the
conservative concern for order is at odds with the progressive interest
in freedom, or when institutionalism clashes with individuality, there
is a stimulus to discover some more comprehensive point of view from
which the divergencies may be brought together, and consistency or
continuity of experience recovered. Often these clashes may be settled
by an individual for himself; the area of the struggle of aims is
limited and a person works out his own rough accommodations. Such
homespun philosophies are genuine and often adequate. But they do not
result in systems of philosophy. These arise when the discrepant claims
of different ideals of conduct affect the community as a whole, and the
need for readjustment is general.
These traits explain some things which are often brought as objections
against philosophies, such as the part played in them by individual
speculation, and their controversial diversity, as well as the fact that
philosophy seems to be repeatedly occupied with much the same questions
differently stated. Without doubt, all these things characterize
historic philosophies more or less.
But they are not objections to philosophy so much as they are to human
nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set. If there
are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must reflect that
uncertainty. If there are different diagnoses of the cause of a
difficulty, and different proposals for dealing with it; if, that is,
the conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of
persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. With respect
to what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring
agreement and certainty. The thing itself is sure. But with reference
to what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is
inevitable precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate.
One would not expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same
philosophy of life as those who were having a hard struggle for
existence. If the possessing and the dispossessed had the same
fundamental disposition toward the world, it would argue either
insincerity or lack of seriousness. A community devoted to industrial
pursuits, active in business and commerce, is not likely to see the
needs and possibilities of life in the same way as a country with high
aæsthetic culture and little enterprise in turning the energies of
nature to mechanical account. A social group with a fairly continuous
history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different way from
one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. Even if the same data
were present, they would be evaluated differently. But the different
sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the
same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different
scheme of values. As for the similarity of problems, this is often more
a matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being
translated into the terms of contemporary perplexities. But in certain
fundamental respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to
time with only such changes as are due to change of social context,
including the growth of the sciences.
The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and
widely felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because
philosophers become a specialized class which uses a technical language,
unlike the vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. But
where a system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of
interests calling for some program of social adjustment may always be
discovered. At this point, the intimate connection between philosophy
and education appears.
In fact, education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to
the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic
discussions. The student of philosophy "in itself" is always in danger
of taking it as so much nimble or severe intellectual exercise—as
something said by philosophers and concerning them alone. But when
philosophic issues are approached from the side of the kind of mental
disposition to which they correspond, or the differences in educational
practice they make when acted upon, the life-situations which they
formulate can never be far from view. If a theory makes no difference
in educational endeavor, it must be artificial. The educational point
of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they
arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or
rejection makes a difference in practice.
If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming
fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and
fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of
education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic—or
verbal—or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere
arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of
values must take effect in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda,
legislative and administrative action are effective in producing the
change of disposition which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but
only in the degree in which they are educative—that is to say, in
the degree in which they modify mental and moral attitudes. And at the
best, such methods are compromised by the fact they are used with those
whose habits are already largely set, while education of youth has a
fairer and freer field of operation. On the other side, the business of
schooling tends to become a routine empirical affair unless its aims and
methods are animated by such a broad and sympathetic survey of its place
in contemporary life as it is the business of philosophy to provide.
Positive science always implies practically the ends which the community
is concerned to achieve. Isolated from such ends, it is matter of
indifference whether its disclosures are used to cure disease or to
spread it; to increase the means of sustenance of life or to manufacture
war material to wipe life out. If society is interested in one of these
things rather than another, science shows the way of attainment.
Philosophy thus has a double task: that of criticizing existing aims
with respect to the existing state of science, pointing out values which
have become obsolete with the command of new resources, showing what
values are merely sentimental because there are no means for their
realization; and also that of interpreting the results of specialized
science in their bearing on future social endeavor. It is impossible
that it should have any success in these tasks without educational
equivalents as to what to do and what not to do. For philosophic theory
has no Aladdin's lamp to summon into immediate existence the values
which it intellectually constructs. In the mechanical arts, the
sciences become methods of managing things so as to utilize their
energies for recognized aims. By the educative arts philosophy may
generate methods of utilizing the energies of human beings in accord
with serious and thoughtful conceptions of life. Education is the
laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are
tested.
It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the
Athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions. The
earlier history of philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and
Italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter
in the history of science rather than of philosophy as that word is
understood to-day. It had nature for its subject, and speculated as to
how things are made and changed. Later the traveling teachers, known as
the Sophists, began to apply the results and the methods of the natural
philosophers to human conduct.
When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe,
instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management
of city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of the
individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some
group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of
knowledge and action. Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be
learned, they asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge.
What, then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone a
preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is coming to know, it
involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness
from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the Greek way of
putting it. How is such a transition possible? Is change, becoming,
development really possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions
answered, what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of reason
to action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly dwelt in action.
Was not knowing, the activity of reason, the noblest attribute of man?
And consequently was not purely intellectual activity itself the highest
of all excellences, compared with which the virtues of neighborliness
and the citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was the
vaunted intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense,
demoralizing to character and destructive of the social ties that bound
men together in their community life? Was not the only true, because the
only moral, life gained through obedient habituation to the customary
practices of the community? And was not the new education an enemy to
good citizenship, because it set up a rival standard to the established
traditions of the community?
In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut loose
from their original practical bearing upon education and were discussed
on their own account; that is, as matters of philosophy as an
independent branch of inquiry. But the fact that the stream of European
philosophical thought arose as a theory of educational procedure remains
an eloquent witness to the intimate connection of philosophy and
education. "Philosophy of education" is not an external application of
ready-made ideas to a system of practice having a radically different
origin and purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems
of the formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to the
difficulties of contemporary social life. The most penetrating
definition of philosophy which can be given is, then, that it is the
theory of education in its most general phases.
The reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and
methods thus go hand in hand. If there is especial need of educational
reconstruction at the present time, if this need makes urgent a
reconsideration of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems,
it is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying
the advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development
of democracy. Such practical changes cannot take place without
demanding an educational reformation to meet them, and without leading
men to ask what ideas and ideals are implicit in these social changes,
and what revisions they require of the ideas and ideals which are
inherited from older and unlike cultures. Incidentally throughout the
whole book, explicitly in the last few chapters, we have been dealing
with just these questions as they affect the relationship of mind and
body, theory and practice, man and nature, the individual and social,
etc. In our concluding chapters we shall sum up the prior discussions
with respect first to the philosophy of knowledge, and then to the
philosophy of morals.
Summary.
—After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues
implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was defined as the
generalized theory of education. Philosophy was stated to be a form of
thinking, which, like all thinking, finds its origin in what is
uncertain in the subject matter of experience, which aims to locate the
nature of the perplexity and to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to
be tested in action. Philosophic thinking has for its differentia the
fact that the uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread
social conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized
interests and institutional claims. Since the only way of bringing
about a harmonious readjustment of the opposed tendencies is through a
modification of emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy is at
once an explicit formulation of the various interests of life and a
propounding of points of view and methods through which a better balance
of interests may be effected. Since education is the process through
which the needed transformation may be accomplished and not remain a
mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a justification of the
statement that philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately
conducted practice.
