The Individual and the World
John Dewey
[from: Democracy and Education, 1916; Chapter
22]
1. Mind as Purely Individual. We have been concerned with the
influences which have effected a division between work and leisure,
knowing and doing, man and nature. These influences have resulted in
splitting up the subject matter of education into separate studies.
They have also found formulation in various philosophies which have
opposed to each other body and mind, theoretical knowledge and
practice, physical mechanism and ideal purpose. Upon the philosophical
side, these various dualisms culminate in a sharp demarcation of
individual minds from the world, and hence from one another. While the
connection of this philosophical position with educational procedure
is not so obvious as is that of the points considered in the last
three chapters, there are certain educational considerations which
correspond to it; such as the antithesis supposed to exist between
subject matter (the counterpart of the world) and method (the
counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to treat interest as
something purely private, without intrinsic connection with the
material studied. Aside from incidental educational bearings, it will
be shown in this chapter that the dualistic philosophy of mind and the
world implies an erroneous conception of the relationship between
knowledge and social interests, and between individuality or freedom,
and social control and authority.
The identification of the mind with the individual self and of the
latter with a private psychic consciousness is comparatively modern.
In both the Greek and medieval periods, the rule was to regard the
individual as a channel through which a universal and divine
intelligence operated. The individual was in no true sense the knower;
the knower was the "Reason" which operated through him. The
individual interfered at his peril, and only to the detriment of the
truth. In the degree in which the individual rather than reason "knew,"
conceit, error, and opinion were substituted for true knowledge. In
Greek life, observation was acute and alert; and thinking was free
almost to the point of irresponsible speculations. Accordingly the
consequences of the theory were only such as were consequent upon the
lack of an experimental method. Without such a method individuals
could not engage in knowing, and be checked up by the results of the
inquiries of others. Without such liability to test by others, the
minds of men could not be intellectually responsible; results were to
be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency, agreeable quality,
or the prestige of their authors. In the barbarian period, individuals
were in a still more humble attitude to truth; important knowledge was
supposed to be divinely revealed, and nothing remained for the minds
of individuals except to work it over after it had been received on
authority. Aside from the more consciously philosophic aspects of
these movements, it never occurs to any one to identify mind and the
personal self wherever beliefs are transmitted by custom.
In the medieval period there was a religious individualism. The
deepest concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul. In
the later Middle Ages, this latent individualism found conscious
formulation in the nominalistic philosophies, which treated the
structure of knowledge as something built up within the individual
through his own acts, and mental states. With the rise of economic and
political individualism after the sixteenth century, and with the
development of Protestantism, the times were ripe for an emphasis upon
the rights and duties of the individual in achieving knowledge for
himself. This led to the view that knowledge is won wholly through
personal and private experiences. As a consequence, mind, the source
and possessor of knowledge, was thought of as wholly individual. Thus
upon the educational side, we find educational reformers, like
Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth vehemently denouncing all learning
which is acquired on hearsay, and asserting that even if beliefs
happen to be true, they do not constitute knowledge unless they have
grown up in and been tested by personal experience. The reaction
against authority in all spheres of life, and the intensity of the
struggle, against great odds, for freedom of action and inquiry, led
to such an emphasis upon personal observations and ideas as in effect
to isolate mind, and set it apart from the world to be known.
This isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch
of philosophy known as epistemology -- the theory of knowledge. The
identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self
as something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf
between the knowing mind and the world that it became a question how
knowledge was possible at all. Given a subject -- the knower -- and an
object -- the thing to be known -- wholly separate from one another,
it is necessary to frame a theory to explain how they get into
connection with each other so that valid knowledge may result. This
problem, with the allied one of the possibility of the world acting
upon the mind and the mind acting upon the world, became almost the
exclusive preoccupation of philosophic thought. The theories that we
cannot know the world as it really is but only the impressions made
upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the individual mind,
or that knowledge is only a certain association of the mind's own
states, were products of this preoccupation. We are not directly
concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate solutions
were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind had been
set over the world of realities. The increasing use of the term "consciousness"
as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition that there is an inner
world of conscious states and processes, independent of any
relationship to nature and society, an inner world more truly and
immediately known than anything else, is evidence of the same fact. In
short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of
thought in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism.
2. Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization. It should be
obvious that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance
of the practical movement. Instead of being its transcript, it was a
perversion. Men were not actually engaged in the absurdity of striving
to be free from connection with nature and one another. They were
striving for greater freedom in nature and society. They wanted
greater power to initiate changes in the world of things and fellow
beings; greater scope of movement and consequently greater freedom in
observations and ideas implied in movement. They wanted not isolation
from the world, but a more intimate connection with it. They wanted to
form their beliefs about it at first hand, instead of through
tradition. They wanted closer union with their fellows so that they
might influence one another more effectively and might combine their
respective actions for mutual aims.
So far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great deal
which passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated opinions of the
past, much of it absurd and its correct portions not understood when
accepted on authority. Men must observe for themselves, and form their
own theories and personally test them. Such a method was the only
alternative to the imposition of dogma as truth, a procedure which
reduced mind to the formal act of acquiescing in truth. Such is the
meaning of what is sometimes called the substitution of inductive
experimental methods of knowing for deductive. In some sense, men had
always used an inductive method in dealing with their immediate
practical concerns. Architecture, agriculture, manufacture, etc., had
to be based upon observation of the activities of natural objects, and
ideas about such affairs had to be checked, to some extent, by
results. But even in such things there was an undue reliance upon mere
custom, followed blindly rather than understandingly. And this
observational-experimental method was restricted to these "practical"
matters, and a sharp distinction maintained between practice and
theoretical knowledge or truth. (See Ch. XX.) The rise of free cities,
the development of travel, exploration, and commerce, the evolution of
new methods of producing commodities and doing business, threw men
definitely upon their own resources. The reformers of science like
Galileo, Descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods
into ascertaining the facts about nature. An interest in discovery
took the place of an interest in systematizing and "proving"
received beliefs.
A just philosophic interpretation of these movements would, indeed,
have emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the individual in
gaining knowledge and personally testing beliefs, no matter by what
authorities they were vouched for. But it would not have isolated the
individual from the world, and consequently isolated individuals -- in
theory -- from one another. It would have perceived that such
disconnection, such rupture of continuity, denied in advance the
possibility of success in their endeavors. As matter of fact every
individual has grown up, and always must grow up, in a social medium.
His responses grow intelligent, or gain meaning, simply because he
lives and acts in a medium of accepted meanings and values. (See ante,
p. 30.) Through social intercourse, through sharing in the activities
embodying beliefs, he gradually acquires a mind of his own. The
conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is at
the very antipodes of the truth. The self achieves mind in the degree
in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life about him; the
self is not a separate mind building up knowledge anew on its own
account.
Yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective
and impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. In one
sense, knowledge is that which we take for granted. It is that which
is settled, disposed of, established, under control. What we fully
know, we do not need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain,
assured. And this does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It
denotes not a sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act
without reserve or quibble. Of course we may be mistaken. What is
taken for knowledge -- for fact and truth -- at a given time may not
be such. But everything which is assumed without question, which is
taken for granted in our intercourse with one another and nature is
what, at the given time, is called knowledge. Thinking on the
contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt or uncertainty. It marks
an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude, instead of one of mastery
and possession. Through its critical process true knowledge is revised
and extended, and our convictions as to the state of things
reorganized.
Clearly the last few centuries have been typically a period of
revision and reorganization of beliefs. Men did not really throw away
all transmitted beliefs concerning the realities of existence, and
start afresh upon the basis of their private, exclusive sensations and
ideas. They could not have done so if they had wished to, and if it
had been possible general imbecility would have been the only outcome.
Men set out from what had passed as knowledge, and critically
investigated the grounds upon which it rested; they noted exceptions;
they used new mechanical appliances to bring to light data
inconsistent with what had been believed; they used their imaginations
to conceive a world different from that in which their forefathers had
put their trust. The work was a piecemeal, a retail, business. One
problem was tackled at a time. The net results of all the revisions
amounted, however, to a revolution of prior conceptions of the world.
What occurred was a reorganization of prior intellectual habitudes,
infinitely more efficient than a cutting loose from all connections
would have been.
This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the
individual, or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or
reconstruction of accepted beliefs. Every new idea, every conception
of things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have
its origin in an individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting,
but a society governed by custom does not encourage their development.
On the contrary, it tends to suppress them, just because they are
deviations from what is current. The man who looks at things
differently from others is in such a community a suspect character;
for him to persist is generally fatal. Even when social censorship of
beliefs is not so strict, social conditions may fail to provide the
appliances which are requisite if new ideas are to be adequately
elaborated; or they may fail to provide any material support and
reward to those who entertain them. Hence they remain mere fancies,
romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations. The freedom of
observation and imagination involved in the modern scientific
revolution were not easily secured; they had to be fought for; many
suffered for their intellectual independence. But, upon the whole,
modern European society first permitted, and then, in some fields at
least, deliberately encouraged the individual reactions which deviate
from what custom prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new
lines, inventions, finally came to be either the social fashion, or in
some degree tolerable.
However, as we have already noted, philosophic theories of knowledge
were not content to conceive mind in the individual as the pivot upon
which reconstruction of beliefs turned, thus maintaining the
continuity of the individual with the world of nature and fellow men.
They regarded the individual mind as a separate entity, complete in
each person, and isolated from nature and hence from other minds. Thus
a legitimate intellectual individualism, the attitude of critical
revision of former beliefs which is indispensable to progress, was
explicitly formulated as a moral and social individualism. When the
activities of mind set out from customary beliefs and strive to effect
transformations of them which will in turn win general conviction,
there is no opposition between the individual and the social. The
intellectual variations of the individual in observation, imagination,
judgment, and invention are simply the agencies of social progress,
just as conformity to habit is the agency of social conservation. But
when knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an
individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his
fellows are ignored and denied.
When the social quality of individualized mental operations is
denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an
individual with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the
conscious separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in
the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a
self-inclosed continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas,
wishes, purposes of everybody else. But when men act, they act in a
common and public world. This is the problem to which the theory of
isolated and independent conscious minds gave rise: Given feelings,
ideas, desires, which have nothing to do with one another, how can
actions proceeding from them be controlled in a social or public
interest? Given an egoistic consciousness, how can action which has
regard for others take place?
Moral philosophies which have started from such premises have
developed four typical ways of dealing with the question.
(i) One method represents the survival of the older authoritative
position, with such concessions and compromises as the progress of
events has made absolutely inevitable. The deviations and departures
characterizing an individual are still looked upon with suspicion; in
principle they are evidences of the disturbances, revolts, and
corruptions inhering in an individual apart from external
authoritative guidance. In fact, as distinct from principle,
intellectual individualism is tolerated in certain technical regions
-- in subjects like mathematics and physics and astronomy, and in the
technical inventions resulting therefrom. But the applicability of a
similar method to morals, social, legal, and political matters, is
denied. In such matters, dogma is still to be supreme; certain eternal
truths made known by revelation, intuition, or the wisdom of our
forefathers set unpassable limits to individual observation and
speculation. The evils from which society suffers are set down to the
efforts of misguided individuals to transgress these boundaries.
Between the physical and the moral sciences, lie intermediate sciences
of life, where the territory is only grudgingly yielded to freedom of
inquiry under the pressure of accomplished fact. Although past history
has demonstrated that the possibilities of human good are widened and
made more secure by trusting to a responsibility built up within the
very process of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets apart a
sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads of
variation of beliefs. Educationally, emphasis may not be put on
eternal truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and
individual variation is discouraged.
(ii) Another method is sometimes termed rationalism or
abstract intellectualism. A formal logical faculty is set up in
distinction from tradition and history and all concrete subject
matter. This faculty of reason is endowed with power to influence
conduct directly. Since it deals wholly with general and impersonal
forms, when different persons act in accord with logical findings,
their activities will be externally consistent. There is no doubt of
the services rendered by this philosophy. It was a powerful factor in
the negative and dissolving criticism of doctrines having nothing but
tradition and class interest behind them; it accustomed men to freedom
of discussion and to the notion that beliefs had to be submitted to
criteria of reasonableness. It undermined the power of prejudice,
superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance upon
argument, discussion. and persuasion. It made for clarity and order of
exposition. But its influence was greater in destruction of old
falsities than in the construction of new ties and associations among
men. Its formal and empty nature, due to conceiving reason as
something complete in itself apart from subject matter, its hostile
attitude toward historical institutions, its disregard of the
influence of habit, instinct, and emotion, as operative factors in
life, left it impotent in the suggestion of specific aims and methods.
Bare logic, however important in arranging and criticizing existing
subject matter, cannot spin new subject matter out of itself. In
education, the correlative is trust in general ready-made rules and
principles to secure agreement, irrespective of seeing to it that the
pupil's ideas really agree with one another.
(iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in
France, English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of
individuals in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued
from isolated streams of consciousness. Legal arrangements, especially
penal administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as
to prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private
sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. Education was
to instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others
and some degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary
for security in the pursuit of one's own happiness. Chief emphasis was
put, however, upon trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one
into harmony with that of others. In commerce, each aims at the
satisfaction of his own wants, but can gain his own profit only by
furnishing some commodity or service to another. Thus in aiming at the
increase of his own private pleasurable states of consciousness, he
contributes to the consciousness of others. Again there is no doubt
that this view expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the
values of conscious life, and a recognition that institutional
arrangements are ultimately to be judged by the contributions which
they make to intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious
experience. It also did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical
devices from the contempt in which they had been held in communities
founded upon the control of a leisure class. In both ways, this
philosophy promoted a wider and more democratic social concern. But it
was tainted by the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine
that every individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and
pains, and that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only
indirect ways of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other
words, it made explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine
which makes mental life a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt
to redirect and readapt common concerns. It made union among men a
matter of calculation of externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous
assertions of Carlyle that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a
constable, and recognized only a "cash nexus" among men. The
educational equivalents of this doctrine in the uses made of
pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only too obvious.
(iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path. It
started from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of
Descartes and his French successors. But while French thought upon the
whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious
conception of a divine mind residing in individuals, German thought
(as in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two. Reason is absolute. Nature
is incarnate reason. History is reason in its progressive unfolding in
man. An individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself
the content of rationality in nature and in social institutions. For
an absolute reason is not, like the reason of rationalism, purely
formal and empty; as absolute it must include all content within
itself. Thus the real problem is not that of controlling individual
freedom so that some measure of social order and concord may result,
but of achieving individual freedom through developing individual
convictions in accord with the universal law found in the organization
of the state as objective Reason. While this philosophy is usually
termed absolute or objective idealism, it might better be termed, for
educational purposes at least, institutional idealism. (See ante, p.
59.) It idealized historical institutions by conceiving them as
incarnations of an immanent absolute mind. There can be no doubt that
this philosophy was a powerful influence in rescuing philosophy in the
beginning of the nineteenth century from the isolated individualism
into which it had fallen in France and England. It served also to make
the organization of the state more constructively interested in
matters of public concern. It left less to chance, less to mere
individual logical conviction, less to the workings of private
self-interest. It brought intelligence to bear upon the conduct of
affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally organized education in
the interests of the corporate state. It sanctioned and promoted
freedom of inquiry in all technical details of natural and historical
phenomena. But in all ultimate moral matters, it tended to reinstate
the principle of authority. It made for efficiency of organization
more than did any of the types of philosophy previously mentioned, but
it made no provision for free experimental modification of this
organization. Political democracy, with its belief in the right of
individual desire and purpose to take part in readapting even the
fundamental constitution of society, was foreign to it.
3. Educational Equivalents. It is not necessary to consider in detail
the educational counterparts of the various defects found in these
various types of philosophy. It suffices to say that in general the
school has been the institution which exhibited with greatest
clearness the assumed antithesis between purely individualistic
methods of learning and social action, and between freedom and social
control. The antithesis is reflected in the absence of a social
atmosphere and motive for learning, and the consequent separation, in
the conduct of the school, between method of instruction and methods
of government; and in the slight opportunity afforded individual
variations. When learning is a phase of active undertakings which
involve mutual exchange, social control enters into the very process
of learning. When the social factor is absent, learning becomes a
carrying over of some presented material into a purely individual
consciousness, and there is no inherent reason why it should give a
more socialized direction to mental and emotional disposition.
There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and the opponents
of freedom in school to identify it with absence of social direction,
or, sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement. But the
essence of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions which will
enable an individual to make his own special contribution to a group
interest, and to partake of its activities in such ways that social
guidance shall be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere
authoritative dictation of his acts. Because what is often called
discipline and "government" has to do with the external side
of conduct alone, a similar meaning is attached, by reaction, to
freedom. But when it is perceived that each idea signifies the quality
of mind expressed in action, the supposed opposition between them
falls away. Freedom means essentially the part played by thinking --
which is personal -- in learning: -- it means intellectual initiative,
independence in observation, judicious invention, foresight of
consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation to them.
But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play
of individuality -- or freedom -- cannot be separated from opportunity
for free play of physical movements. Enforced physical quietude may be
unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the
observations needed to define it, and to performance of the
experiments which test the ideas suggested. Much has been said about
the importance of "self-activity" in education, but the
conception has too frequently been restricted to something merely
internal -- something excluding the free use of sensory and motor
organs. Those who are at the stage of learning from symbols, or who
are engaged in elaborating the implications of a problem or idea
preliminary to more carefully thought-out activity, may need little
perceptible overt activity. But the whole cycle of self-activity
demands an opportunity for investigation and experimentation, for
trying out one's ideas upon things, discovering what can be done with
materials and appliances. And this is incompatible with closely
restricted physical activity.
Individual activity has sometimes been taken as meaning leaving a
pupil to work by himself or alone. Relief from need of attending to
what any one else is doing is truly required to secure calm and
concentration. Children, like grown persons, require a judicious
amount of being let alone. But the time, place, and amount of such
separate work is a matter of detail, not of principle. There is no
inherent opposition between working with others and working as an
individual. On the contrary, certain capacities of an individual are
not brought out except under the stimulus of associating with others.
That a child must work alone and not engage in group activities in
order to be free and let his individuality develop, is a notion which
measures individuality by spatial distance and makes a physical thing
of it.
Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a double
meaning. In the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he
has his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. The phrase
"think for one's self' is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for
one's self, it isn't thinking. Only by a pupil's own observations,
reflections, framing and testing of suggestions can what he already
knows be amplified and rectified. Thinking is as much an individual
matter as is the digestion of food. In the second place, there are
variations of point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of
attack, from person to person. When these variations are suppressed in
the alleged interests of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a
single mold of method of study and recitation, mental confusion and
artificiality inevitably result. Originality is gradually destroyed,
confidence in one's own quality of mental operation is undermined, and
a docile subjection to the opinion of others is inculcated, or else
ideas run wild. The harm is greater now than when the whole community
was governed by customary beliefs, because the contrast between
methods of learning in school and those relied upon outside the school
is greater. That systematic advance in scientific discovery began when
individuals were allowed, and then encouraged, to utilize their own
peculiarities of response to subject matter, no one will deny. If it
is said in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of any
such originality, and hence must be confined to appropriating and
reproducing things already known by the better informed, the reply is
twofold. (i) We are concerned with originality of attitude which is
equivalent to the unforced response of one's own individuality, not
with originality as measured by product. No one expects the young to
make original discoveries of just the same facts and principles as are
embodied in the sciences of nature and man. But it is not unreasonable
to expect that learning may take place under such conditions that from
the standpoint of the learner there is genuine discovery. While
immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of
advanced students, they make them from their own standpoint, whenever
there is genuine learning. (ii) In the normal process of becoming
acquainted with subject matter already known to others, even young
pupils react in unexpected ways. There is something fresh, something
not capable of being fully anticipated by even the most experienced
teacher, in the ways they go at the topic, and in the particular ways
in which things strike them. Too often all this is brushed aside as
irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing material in the
exact form in which the older person conceives it. The result is that
what is instinctively original in individuality, that which marks off
one from another, goes unused and undirected. Teaching then ceases to
be an educative process for the teacher. At most he learns simply to
improve his existing technique; he does not get new points of view; he
fails to experience any intellectual companionship. Hence both
teaching and learning tend to become conventional and mechanical with
all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied.
As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or
less random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined
or specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student
may be in a position of complete physical quietude, because his
energies are confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus
of the eyes and vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of
intense mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it
does not follow that it should be set up as a model for students who
still have to find their intellectual way about. And even with the
adult, it does not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. It marks
an intermediate period, capable of being lengthened with increased
mastery of a subject, but always coming between an earlier period of
more general and conspicuous organic action and a later time of
putting to use what has been apprehended.
When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and
body in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the
need of obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the
freedom which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking
by which what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and
refined. If attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be
met in order to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking,
freedom will take care of itself. The individual who has a question
which being really a question to him instigates his curiosity, which
feeds his eagerness for information that will help him cope with it,
and who has at command an equipment which will permit these interests
to take effect, is intellectually free. Whatever initiative and
imaginative vision he possesses will be called into play and control
his impulses and habits. His own purposes will direct his actions.
Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his memorizings and
reproductions, will partake of intellectual servility. Such a
condition of intellectual subjection is needed for fitting the masses
into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or ideas
of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority. It is
not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic.
Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the
grip of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief.
Aside from sporadic instances, like the height of Greek thought, it is
a comparatively modern manifestation. Not but that there have always
been individual diversities, but that a society dominated by
conservative custom represses them or at least does not utilize them
and promote them. For various reasons, however, the new individualism
was interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies
for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an
assertion that each individual's mind was complete in isolation from
everything else. In the theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced
the epistemological problem: the question as to the possibility of any
cognitive relationship of the individual to the world. In its
practical phase, it generated the problem of the possibility of a
purely individual consciousness acting on behalf of general or social
interests, -- the problem of social direction. While the philosophies
which have been elaborated to deal with these questions have not
affected education directly, the assumptions underlying them have
found expression in the separation frequently made between study and
government and between freedom of individuality and control by others.
Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind is that it
designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of
movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair
leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc.
A society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up
to a limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal
within each class. A progressive society counts individual variations
as precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence
a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for
intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in
its educational measures.
|