democracy and education
Chapter 1
1. Renewal of Life by Transmission.
Renewal of Life: Life differs from inanimate things is that living things take in energy and turn them into further existence, which is the essence of growing. Therefore, life is a self-renewing process. Based on the context, "life" does not equal to individual one, not to a physical thing; the word "life" denotes the whole range of experience, individual and racial. Thus, the "renewal of life" equals to "the continuity of experience". This continuity of experience exists in EDUCATION.
Transmission: Education is essential because of organism's birth and death. The graded gap between the original capacities of the young and the standards and customs of the elder can only be spaned by education. Education works as a transmission through communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards between the old and the young. Therefore, education is not a personal interest but a social need. This transmission is important, because without it or the old, the young can hardly keep physical existence.
2. Education and Communication
Communication: Society exists in communication. People live in a community means that people communicate in order to have in common. Societies consists of persons with a consensus of the common end. But even the most social group is a machine-like plane, in which people use each other to get desired results--they do not really communicate. However, social life should be identical with communication, in which people share experience till it becomes a common possession, and communication itself is educative, and even the process of living together, which requires communication, is educative.
Education: There are two kinds way of communicating, the informal communication, which occurs in daily life, and involves human association, and the formal communication, in which school is only a superfacial means of for transmiting the continuity of experience. In the undeveloped society, it seems preposterous to seek out formal education, because people are closely connected, and young people are trained to imitating the elders. But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of the old widens, direct imitaition is replaced by deliberate training; thus intentional agencies appear, in which knowledge of a complex society canbe transimited between the old and the young. But there is a danger of formal education, knowledge become abstract, and people become bookish, in which education is not related to social necessity or human associations, but is simplified as the acquisition of literacy. Therefore, it is essential to keep the balance between the informal and formal communication.
Chapter 2: Education as a social function
1. The nature and meaning of environment: Nature: Education is a way of shaping people into standard forms of social activities. But beliefs and aspirations can hardly be communicated; thus, environment which calls out certain responses to beliefs and aspirations is essential. The environment, in its essence, is a continuity of suroundings with one's own active tendencies, a sustaining or frustating condition which signifies certain activities.
2. The social environment: In social environment, everyone depends on each other--what he does and what he can do depend on the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others. Social environment can shape external habits of action, which leave mental reactions. In this way, many immature people are just trained like animals: to avoid pain and to get pleasure. But shaping external habits is still not educative. Social environment should promote emotional attitudes, in which language is involved. Language imparts knowledge seems like a physical process, but language can hardly be used in transmitting abstract ideas. The sound in language is meaningless until one connects the sound with a shared experience. Understanding each other means people share the same value, and then they can develop new meanings with this shared understanding of words. Social environment should provide some impulses for people to travel through the experience.
The effects of environment should be marked: the habits of language, the manner, the good taste and esthetic appreciation, and the fusion of all above.
3. The school as a special environment: School is specially designed to infuence mental and moral disposition of a society's members. In school, people learn the written symbols, which select and record matters foreign to everyday life. Three functions of school should be noted: it provides a simplified environment, in which young members could be graded into a complex civilization; it eliminate unworthy features and idealizes the existing achievements to make for a better future society; it balances various elements so that individuals gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of reality but contacts with a broader environment.
Chapter 3: do not understand
Chapter 4: Education as Growth
1. The conditions of growth: Growth is the result which involves early direction and cumulative movement of action. Immaturity is a positive power to develop. People often regard immaturity as privation, because immaturity is often measured by a fixed standard from adulthood. In fact, immaturity is positive due to its two features, dependence and plasticity. Dependence is constructive; child is physically weak so the young has to develop a sompensatory power: social capacity. Thus, child is inately socially intelligent, while adults have mastered these social compacities which have ceased to interest them. Moreover, dependence increases personal interdependence, so that people can be connected and avoid to be aloof. Dependence also benefits adults, because it stimulates one to nurture and affection. Plasticity is a power to learn experience and to learn from experience for a later situation. Therefore, increasing complexity of social life requires a longer period of infancy in which to learn the needed powers.
2. Habits as Expressions of Growth: Habit requires an environment in which people get used to things, and then a specific adjustment, which means that people only introduce needed changes to respond to the environment. Habits means the formation of intellectual and emotional disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of action; habits are not fixed routines.
3. The educational bearings of the conception of development: adults and children are developing themselves with different modes: With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosty, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness.
Chapter 5: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
1. Preparation: Education is regarded as a process of preparation, which results in evil consequences, including loss of impetus, procrastination, substitution of expectations, and pleasure and pain.
2. Unfolding: education is regarded as unfolding of latent powers toward a definite goal, but the goal is so vague and unattainable that people have to set up criterions, like Hega'sl and Froebel's attempts.
3. Discipline????
Chapter 6: Education as Connservative and Progressive
1. Formation: Education is regarded as the formation of mind, in which the immature is exposed to presentations of various qualities in reaction to the various realities which act upon it. The formation of mind relies on the presentation of proper materials and on the arrangement of the sequence of these presentations, in which the older/familiar will be first and the new be subsequent. From this prespetive, teaching is a conscious business with a definite aim and procedure. But the problems of this view include how to ensure the sequence of new materials interacting with the old?
2. Recapitulation and retrospection: education is retrospetive, relying on the literary products of the past.
3. Reconstruction:
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Chapter 7: The Democratic Conception in Education
Education varies with quality of life in a community, so education form depends upon the nature of a society.
1. Human association: human association is always loosely associated, and there are many varieties of society, good and bad, in which education tends to socialize its members according to the habits and aims of the group. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes: there is no ideal society; extracting desirable traits from one society to criticize undesirable traits and suggests improvements of another one is problematic. It is necessary to set up criterion.
a. A despotically governed state: there is common interests in such organizations.
2. Democratical ideal: Democracy requires the recognition of mutual benefits, and readjustment in social habits, which in inturn requires a systematic education. With the increasing individualization and expansive mutual benefits, the system will be overwhelmed and corrupted.
3. The Platonic educational philosophy: According to Plato, society is stably organized when each individual makes use of their own nature, and it is the bussiness of education to discover the nature and aptitudes. However, these assumptions are restricted, because people may be characterized with indefinite plurality of activities, and the sifting education does not discover human nature but classify people into three broad classes: laboring and trading class, citizen-subject class, and legislator of state class. A society might change yet be stable. "The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely."
4. The "Nature" from Plato was developed to denote the diversity of individual talents, in which "Nature" idea propels social progress, ans springs into cosmopolitanism and humanity. Nature is later strengthened by the advances of natural science. In order to break the previous artificial, corrupted, and inequitable social order, people define human nature as an originally passive and empty mind, which can be filled with the truth of harmonious natural world.
5. Education as national and as social: people gradually realize that leaving everything to natural world was to neglect the very idea of education, and then Develop education as a civic function, in which humanity was replaced by the state need, cosmopolitanism replaced by nationalism, and public education is seeking for the social efficiency. Germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against the Napoleon for national independence is a typical example in this trend. However, Count expresses the earlier individual cosmopolitan ideal that education should make possible for future better humanity. But the problem is that each generation is inclined to educate it's young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view for the future.
Institutions educate people's better tools for their own intentions. 2 results: individual and social conceptions become meaningless, and social aim was narrow and exclusive. Science, commerce, and art transcend national boundries; they involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different countries. But the idea of national sovereignty has never been accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Is it possible for an education system to be contacted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process normally restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Such questions face internal and external obstacles.
Chapter 8: Aims in Education
In democratic society, education enables people to continue their education or their capacity for growth. The education aim is concerned with the contrast between the end within the education process and an end set up from outside. Any energy has results, but results are effects, not an end.
