Basic Concepts of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education | Introduction to Philosophy | Course code 8609 | B.Ed Solved Assignment |

QUESTION 

Discuss the basic concepts of John Dewey’s philosophy of education.

Course: Introduction to Philosophy

Course code 8609

Level: B.Ed Solved Assignment 

ANSWER  

JOHN DEWEY

John Dewey, the greatest of the pragmatists and generally recognized as the most outstanding philosopher his country has yet produced, made significant contributions to virtually every field of philosophy as well as to such other areas of inquiry as education and psychology. Active for 70 years as a scholar, he was a prolific writer publishing approximately fifty books and more than a hundred articles. Many of these have been translated into various foreign languages. New volumes are still coming out with more Dewey material, mainly correspondence, and books and articles on him are appearing at a rapidly increasing rate. 

Philosophy of Education

1.   Analysis of reflective inquiry. Perhaps the most important single emphasis of John Dewey is his insistence upon applying reflective or critical inquiry to problems or indeterminate situations. What is involved in problem-solving or thinking through a problem? What is critical inquiry? How does one apply intelligence to human affairs? Dewey's answer to these questions is outlined in its simplest terms in How We Think, and a more sophisticated version is given in Logic; The Theory of Inquiry. In a sense, the phases or steps in a complete act of reflective thinking afford an outline for each of his major works, and he had a lifelong concern with what is involved in reflective thinking. 

2.   View of experience. Experience is one of the central concepts in Dewey's thought, occurring and recurring throughout his writing. Though he finally concluded that he might have done better to use another term, many of his most important works are concerned with clarifying it- for example, his Casus Lectures: Experience and Nature or his Art as Experience or Experience and Education. For him experience constitutes the entire range of men's relations to, or transactions with the universe. We experience nature and things interacting in certain ways made up of experience. 

3.   View of Knowledge. Dewey rejects the traditional epistemology which sets up a knower outside the world and then asks about the possibility, extent, and validity of knowledge in general. He laughingly suggests that we might equally well have a problem with digestion in general- its possibility, extent, and genuineness—by assuming that the stomach and the food materials were inhabitants of different worlds. The significant problem is not how such a knower is somehow to mirror the antecedently real but rather how one set of experienced events is to be used as signs of what we shall experience under another set of conditions. 

The important distinction, moreover, is not between the knower as the subject and the world known as the object. Instead, it is between different ways of being in the movement of things, between an unreflective physical way and a purposive, intelligent one. 

In Dewey's view knowledge needs to be placed in the context of the problematic or indeterminate situation and reflective inquiry. Knowledge is more than immediate awareness or the presence of a set of sense data. Having qualities before us does not constitute knowing. Knowledge is always inferential, and the problem is how the processes of inference are to be guided to trustworthy or warranted conclusions. It involves operations of controlled observation, testing, and experimentation. It is a product of inquiry—the steps in a complete act of reflective thinking. Dewey liked Bacon's idea that knowledge is power and it may be tested by the promotion of social progress.

4. Conception of philosophy. In "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" Dewey declares that philosophy must cease to be "a device for dealing with the problems of philosophy" and become "a method, cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of men". But the problems of man as he sees them cover a range broad enough to include in one way or another most of the traditional problems as well as many others. The method involves treating philosophy as vision,

imagination, and reflection; and though the clarifying process may show that certain epistemological problems are pseudo-problems, the fact that they are raised may point to genuine cultural crises. If the action at all levels needs to be informed with vision, imagination, and reflection to bring clarity to mind future possibilities about attaining the better and averting the worse, there is more than enough for philosophy to do. 

5.   Biologism. What is sometimes referred to as Dewey's biologism reflects:

•  His emphasis on the genetic point of view, and
•  His conviction is that inquiry has a biological matrix. 

He was interested in how ideas originate and become more complex, in the parallels between human responses and lower levels, and in the continuity of different species of organic life from the lowest forms to man. To understand the present situation, he held, we inquire into its specific conditions as well into its probable consequences. 

6.  Experimentalism. Dewey's experimentalism relates to his analysis of reflective inquiry for which hypotheses, prediction, and experimentation are central. An experiment is a program of action to determine consequences. It is a way of introducing intelligence into a situation. It is an intelligently guided procedure for discovering what adjustments an organism must make to its environment to ward off ill or secure goods. Experimentation for Dewey is relevant not merely on the individual biological level, but wherever planned reconstruction of a situation may help effect the desired transformation, for example, in social planning or in education. The more important the issue at stake, the more clearly is experimentation seen to be preferable to such alternatives as authoritarianism, simple guesswork or merely waiting for events to run their course. 

7.   Instrumentalism. Dewey's instrumentalism also stems from his analysis of reflective inquiry. Ideas are not copies, images, or visions of external objects but rather tools or instruments to facilitate an organism's behavior. They are instruments for operating on things or on stimuli. Things or objects are what we can do with them, and we can distinguish among them by the behavioral reactions they make possible. 

Truth, accordingly, is adverbial. It is a way ideas work out in practice. It is a matter of whether hypotheses lead to predicted consequences, an affair of verified predictions of warranted assertions. Dewey's instrumentalism encourages a new respect for instruments or means. The more we value ends or goals, in his view, the greater our attention to the means which may bring them about. The separation of goods into natural and moral or into instrumental and intrinsic may have the harmful consequence of making moral and intrinsic goods more remote from daily living besides encouraging us to think that we can have the intrinsic without having to concern ourselves with the instrumental. Viewing any good as merely instrumental, moreover, is fairly sure not to do it justice. 

8.   Relativism. Dewey's relativism is to be opposed to absolutism and is a way of stressing the importance of context, situation, and relationships. To take things out of relations is to deprive them of value and meaning. Absolutes are ruled out in his view, and unqualified generalizations are likely to be misleading. An economic policy or a plan of action is good relative to a specific situation which makes it desirable. A knife may be good for sharpening a pencil and bad for cutting a rope, but to speak of it without qualifications as good or bad is quite misleading.

 9.   Meliorism. In ethics, according to Dewey's account in Reconstruction in Philosophy, the emphasis should be placed on improving or bettering our present situation rather than upon good or bad in some absolute sense. The good, if one is to speak of the good rather than the better, is what will enable us to solve the problem or difficulty. Thus what is usually referred to as a moral end or standard becomes in this view a hypothesis as to how to overcome a moral problem. Since every problematic situation is unique, values are also unique; but if one is to specify an end, then growth, education, or problem-solving would be that end. Instead of treating the acquisition of skill and attainment of culture as ends, we should see them as marks of growth and means to its continuing difficulties or furthering growth.

 10.   Humanism.  Dewey's humanism stems from his acceptance of the Baconian view that knowledge is tested by the promotion of human intelligence based in good part on the experience of modern science for the sake of bettering the human situation. Supernaturalism and the usual dogmas of revealed religion have no place in Dewey's view. As he tells us in A Common Faith, the things of greatest value in civilization exist by the grace of the continuous human community in which we are a link and we have the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying, and expanding our heritage of values so that those who come after us may share it more generously and more securely. Our common faith draws its main stand from our attempt to carry out this responsibility. 

11.   Education and experience. Most of the major theses in Dewey's general philosophy find expression in his philosophy of education. Reflective inquiry is as central for education, in his view, as for any other phase of life or experience. Indeed, for him, education is a problem-solving process, and we learn by doing, by having an opportunity to react in real-life situations. In education not indoctrination, but inquiry is focal. Not simply amassing facts but learning to apply intelligence to problem-solving has a top priority. Education must be experimental without simply improvisation.

 The reconstructive purpose is as much at work in education as anywhere else in experience. As he says in Democracy and Education, "Education is a constant reorganizing and reconstructing of experience". Present experiences must be so guided as to make future experiences more meaningful and worthwhile. Though the value and the knowledge of the past are transmitted, this must be done in such a fashion as to broaden, deepen, and otherwise improve them. Criticism and not simply passive acceptance are demanded. 

Dewey equates education and growth. As teachers, we start with the child where he now is, with his present stock of interests and knowledge, and seek to help him expand and enrich both his interests and his knowledge and grow as a person in his community and his society. He learns to work responsibly for his own development and for social conditions which will encourage a similar development for all other members of his society. Education must not be simply a means to something else. It should not be merely preparation for the future. As a process of growth it should have its own enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding features at the same time that it helps further continued education, and, in Dewey's view, the test of our social institutions may be found in their effect in furthering continued education or growth. Dewey himself had considerable reservations over some features of "progressive education", but he continued to emphasize some of the strengths of the newer education as compared with the traditional outlook. His humanism and meliorism are richly exemplified in his account of the theory and practice of education. His philosophy of education stresses the social nature of education, its intimate and multiple relations to democracy, and its cultural significance. 

Aims of Education

According to Dewey the aim of education is the development of a child's powers and abilities. It is impossible to lay down any definite principle for a particular kind of development because this development will differ from one child to the next, in conformity with the unique abilities of the individual. The educator should guide the child according to the abilities and powers he observes in it. It is better, in Dewey's opinion, to leave the question of educational objectives unanswered. If a definite aim is ascribed to education, it may do very great harm by compelling the teacher to guide the education in a particular direction, not in keeping with the innate abilities of the child. 

In general, the aim of education is to create an atmosphere in which the child gets an opportunity to be active and contribute to the social awakening of the human race. From a pragmatic standpoint, education aims at creating social efficiency in the child. Man is a social being who must develop within the confines of society, outside which he cannot develop at all. For this reason, education must aim at creating social efficiency and skill. Pragmatic education aims at instilling democratic values and ideals in the individual, at creating a democratic society in which there is no distinction between one individual and another, each individual is completely independent and willing to cooperate with others. Every individual must be given the freedom to develop his own desires and achieve his ambitions. Every individual must be equal to every other member of society. Such a society can be created only when there is no fundamental difference between individual and collective interests. Hence, education should create cooperation and harmony among individuals, instilling democratic values in school-going children. 

In fact, the school itself is a miniature form of a democratic society in which the child undergoes various forms of development, of which moral education and development are the most important. Morality can be developed through active participation because such participation in the activities of the school trains the child in shouldering responsibility. This develops the individual's character and grants him social skills. Equality of opportunity in the school helps to develop boys and girls according to their own individual traits and inclinations. 

Pragmatic education is basically practical in as much as it aims at preparing the individual for future life in such a manner that he can fulfill his requirements and achieve contentment. Future life in the pragmatic sense implies not merely individual life but also social life. Dewey was critical of the contemporary modes of education because they tend to drive the child away from democratic life by giving advantages to a small section of society. It also lays more stress on books or formal teaching than is really desirable. This mode of teaching compels the educator to listen to long lectures which blunt his own mental powers. Hence, Dewey laid the foundations of a progressive education in the form of a Progressive School which aimed at establishing democratic values and developing the child's personality.

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