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Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education Flashcards

John Dewey · Public domain edition · 390 cards · 104 chapters

John Dewey argues that education is the process by which society transmits its accumulated experience and renews itself, and that formal schooling carries risks when separated from everyday life. This deck covers his account of communication, immaturity, social continuity, and the balance education must strike between informal and deliberate teaching.

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Chapter 1 · Question

For Dewey, what most notably distinguishes living from inanimate things?

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Section 14 cards

For Dewey, what most notably distinguishes living from inanimate things?
The author argues that living things maintain themselves by renewal, while inanimate things like a stone merely resist or shatter. A living being tries to turn surrounding energies—light, air, moisture, soil—into means of its own further existence. If it cannot, it loses its identity as a living thing rather than just splitting into pieces. Life is thus a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Chapter 1
Why does Dewey say education is necessary for social continuity?
The author argues that birth and death of group members create the need: the immature are born without language, beliefs, or standards, while adults possess the group's knowledge and customs. The young must be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and practices of the mature members, or the group ceases its characteristic life. Education alone spans the gap between immaturity and adult standards.
Chapter 1
How does the gap between immature capacities and adult standards change with civilization?
The author argues that even in a savage tribe, adult achievements far exceed what the immature could reach alone. With the growth of civilization, the gap between original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of elders increases. Mere physical growing up and mastery of bare subsistence no longer suffice to reproduce the group's life; deliberate effort and thoughtful pains are required.
Chapter 1
By what process does society exist, according to Dewey?
The author argues that society exists through transmission as much as biological life does. This transmission occurs through communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from older to younger—ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions passed from those leaving group life to those entering it. Without this communication, social life could not survive. If members lived on continuously, education would be a personal-interest task rather than a social necessity.
Chapter 1

Section 24 cards

According to Dewey, what makes society's renewal through transmission not automatic?
Dewey states that the constant reweaving of the social fabric is possible because some are born as others die, but this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to ensure genuine and thorough transmission, even the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then savagery. Human young are so immature that without guidance they could not acquire even the rudimentary abilities needed for physical existence.
Chapter 2
What distinguishes a community from a machine-like group, per Dewey?
Dewey argues that physical proximity or working for a common end does not create a community; machine parts cooperate maximally but form no community. A community requires that members be cognizant of and interested in the common end, regulating their activity in view of it. This demands communication: each must know what others are about and inform them of purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.
Chapter 2
Why does Dewey claim all communication is educative for both parties?
Dewey argues that receiving a communication enlarges and changes experience, modifying one's attitude. The communicator is also affected: to communicate an experience fully and accurately, especially a complicated one, it must be formulated, which requires getting outside it, seeing it as another would, and imaginatively assimilating something of the other's experience. All communication is like art, and social arrangements lose educative power only when cast in a mold and routine.
Chapter 2
How does Dewey distinguish incidental education from deliberate formal education?
Dewey distinguishes the education everyone gets from living with others, which is incidental, natural, and important but not the express reason of the association, from the deliberate educating of the young. He argues the worth of any social institution is its effect in enlarging and improving experience, yet this effect was not its original motive, which was limited and practical—religion, family, and labor began otherwise. The by-product was only gradually noted.
Chapter 2

Section 34 cards

Why does formal schooling arise as civilizations advance, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues that as civilization advances, the gap widens between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults. Learning by directly sharing in adult pursuits becomes difficult because much adult work is remote in space and meaning, so playful imitation is no longer adequate. Intentional agencies—schools—and explicit material—studies—are devised, and teaching is delegated to a special group of persons.
Chapter 3
What dangers does Dewey say accompany the shift from informal to formal education?
Dewey warns that formal instruction easily becomes remote and dead—abstract and bookish. Knowledge stored in symbols is far from translation into familiar acts, so it is relatively technical and superficial. The standing danger is that school subject matter becomes isolated from life-experience, and the permanent social interests are lost from view, reducing education to imparting information and acquiring literacy.
Chapter 3
How does Dewey describe education in undeveloped social groups?
In undeveloped groups there is very little formal teaching. Savage groups rely mainly on the same association that keeps adults loyal to the group, with no special devices or institutions for teaching except initiation ceremonies. Children learn customs, emotional set, and ideas by sharing in what elders do—partly direct apprenticeship in adult occupations, partly indirect through dramatic play reproducing grown-ups' actions.
Chapter 3
What balance does Dewey say the philosophy of education must maintain?
Dewey says one of the weightiest problems is keeping a proper balance between informal and formal, incidental and intentional, modes of education. When acquiring information and technical skill does not influence the formation of a social disposition, vital experience fails to gain meaning, while schooling creates only 'sharps' in learning—egoistic specialists. Avoiding a split between consciously learned and unconsciously absorbed knowledge grows more delicate with special schooling.
Chapter 3

Section 44 cards

How does Dewey say beliefs and aspirations are communicated to the young?
Dewey argues beliefs cannot be physically extracted and inserted or literally inculcated; they are communicated through the action of the environment calling out certain responses. The medium in which a person exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than another, strengthens some beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning others' approval, gradually producing a system of behavior and disposition of action.
Chapter 4
What does Dewey mean by environment, as opposed to mere surroundings?
Dewey argues environment denotes the specific continuity of surroundings with a being's own active tendencies, not just what encompasses it. Inanimate things are continuous with surroundings but do not truly have an environment, since they are not concerned in the influences affecting them. The environment consists of conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being; remote things may form it more truly than close ones.
Chapter 4
What distinguishes training from educative teaching for Dewey?
Dewey argues training changes outer action rather than mental and emotional dispositions, though the distinction is not sharp. The key differentia: a horse does not share in the social use of its action, remaining interested in food rather than the service rendered, and is not a partner in shared activity. In education, the person participates in common activity, so the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him that animate others.
Chapter 4
How does a warlike tribe shape a boy's mental habitudes, per Dewey?
Dewey argues the tribe's medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains he is disliked, ridiculed, and shut out from favorable recognition. Thus his original belligerent tendencies are strengthened and his ideas turn to war, since only this way can he become a fully recognized member of his group.
Chapter 4

Section 54 cards

According to Dewey, what two steps make the social medium educative?
Dewey says setting up conditions that stimulate visible, tangible ways of acting is the first step; making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so he feels its success as his own and its failure as his own is the completing step. Once possessed by the group's emotional attitude, he recognizes its ends and means, and his beliefs and knowledge take similar form.
Chapter 5
How does Dewey explain a child learning the word 'hat'?
The sound 'hat' would stay as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw unless uttered in connection with an action participated in by several people. When the mother says 'hat' while putting something on the baby's head as they go out, the shared activity gives the sound the same meaning for child and parent. Language meaning depends on connection with shared experience.
Chapter 5
How does Dewey apply shared activity to learning about a Greek helmet from words?
Dewey argues the words originally gained meaning through use in action with a common interest and end. Now they arouse meaning by inciting the hearer or reader to rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use. The understander becomes mentally a partner with those who used it, engaging through imagination in a shared activity. Most people stop at 'queer headgear.'
Chapter 5
What does Dewey say social environment does versus conscious teaching?
Dewey argues the social environment forms mental and emotional disposition by engaging individuals in activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses with certain purposes and consequences—unconsciously and apart from set purpose. What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most free capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, purge some grossness, and furnish objects making activity more productive of meaning.
Chapter 5

Section 61 cards

What three functions does Dewey assign to the school as a special environment?
Dewey lists three specific functions: first, to provide a simplified environment, selecting fundamental features and ordering them progressively; second, to eliminate unworthy features of the existing environment, establishing a purified medium of action; and third, to counteract undesirable influences in ordinary social life by selecting the best for exclusive use and reinforcing its power.
Chapter 6

Section 74 cards

Why does Dewey say the school must balance the social environment?
Dewey argues that modern society is many loosely connected societies—households, playmates, clubs, businesses, races, religions, and economic divisions—each shaping its members. The school's office is to balance these elements so each individual can escape the limitations of the group he was born into and come into living contact with a broader environment.
Chapter 7
What three functions does Dewey assign the special school environment?
Dewey lists three important functions: simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition it wishes to develop; purifying and idealizing existing social customs; and creating a wider, better balanced environment than the young would likely get if left to themselves. These go beyond the incidental education that comes from merely taking part in group activities.
Chapter 7
Why did the demand for a common school arise in the United States?
Dewey argues that with commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the United States combine groups with different traditional customs. This situation, perhaps more than any other cause, forced the demand for an educational institution providing a homogeneous and balanced environment, counteracting the centrifugal forces of juxtaposed groups within one political unit.
Chapter 7
How does Dewey distinguish guidance, control, and direction?
Dewey says guidance best conveys assisting through cooperation the natural capacities of those guided; control suggests energy brought from without meeting resistance; direction is more neutral, suggesting active tendencies led in a continuous course instead of dispersing aimlessly. He argues control wrongly implies individuals are naturally egoistic and antisocial, when people are chiefly interested in cooperative doings.
Chapter 7

Section 84 cards

According to Dewey, what are the two aspects of direction?
Dewey argues direction is both simultaneous and successive. Simultaneously, it selects from partially called-out tendencies those that center energy on the point of need. Successively, it requires each act be balanced with those before and after, achieving order of activity. He calls these focusing and ordering—one spatial, the other temporal—and says they cannot be separated in practice.
Chapter 8
Why does Dewey say purely external direction is impossible?
Dewey argues the environment can only supply stimuli to call out responses, and responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even threats work only because a person has the instinct of fear; without it, threats have no more influence than light on a person with no eyes. Thus all direction is really re-direction, shifting existing activities into another channel.
Chapter 8
What mistake does Dewey warn against when controlling others?
Dewey warns that control by customs and regulations may be short-sighted: it can achieve an immediate effect while throwing subsequent action out of balance. A threat may stop a behavior by arousing fear, yet leave the person exposed to worse influences later, or arouse cunning and slyness so evasion appeals more. Those directing others risk overlooking sequential development.
Chapter 8
What distinction does Dewey draw between physical and moral results?
Dewey argues we must discriminate physical from moral results in immediate action upon others. Forcible feeding or confinement may be necessary for someone's good, and a child may be snatched from fire, but no improvement of disposition or educative effect need follow. Confusing physical with educative results loses the chance to enlist the person's own participating disposition.
Chapter 8

Section 94 cards

According to Dewey, when should conscious acts of control be limited?
Dewey argues conscious control should be limited to acts so instinctive or impulsive that the performer cannot foresee their outcome. If a person cannot foresee consequences and cannot understand what more experienced people tell them about the outcome, intelligent self-guidance is impossible. In such cases, letting the person experiment may work, but some actions are too disruptive to others, so disapproval, shaming, ridicule, rebuke, or punishment are used instead.
Chapter 9
What does Dewey call the more important and permanent mode of control?
Dewey argues the more important, permanent mode of control lies in how people the immature being associates with use things—the instrumentalities they employ for their own ends. The very existence of the social medium is the standing effective agency directing activity. Even if a mother never told her daughter to help, the child would be directed by merely sharing household life; imitation, emulation, and the need to work together enforce control.
Chapter 9
Why does Dewey reject separating physical from social environment?
Dewey argues there is no direct influence of one person on another apart from using the physical environment as intermediary. A smile, frown, rebuke, or word of warning all involve physical change; otherwise one attitude could not alter another. Separating the two environments exaggerates the moral importance of personal control and exaggerates the intellectual possibilities of contact with a purely physical environment.
Chapter 9
How does Dewey define a mental act versus adjustment to a physical stimulus?
Dewey argues a mental act involves response to a thing in its meaning, while adjustment to a physical stimulus does not. A noise may make me jump without mind being implicated; but hearing a noise, running for water, and putting out a blaze is intelligent because the sound meant fire. Bumping a stone and kicking it is physical; moving it so no one stumbles is intelligent. When things have meaning, we intend what we do.
Chapter 9

Section 104 cards

According to Dewey, what distinguishes blind training from genuine education?
Dewey argues that repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a habit, but this is mere training, not education. Habits formed without awareness possess and control us rather than the reverse. Only when a person acts with an end in view, knowing what he is about and performing the act for the sake of its meaning, can he be said to be educated.
Chapter 10
What makes pulling a rope a genuinely shared activity rather than mere juxtaposition?
Dewey holds that pulling at a rope others happen to pull is not conjoint activity unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of helping or hindering them. Shared activity requires each person to refer what he does to what the other does, placing both acts in the same inclusive situation.
Chapter 10
How does an infant's crying become socially directed rather than merely organic?
Dewey's example: an infant cries while food is prepared. If he does not connect his own state with what others are doing, he simply reacts to his own discomfort and is physically controlled by his organic state. But when he makes a back-and-forth reference, he takes interest, watches others, and his own state becomes an object for him—his attitude becomes intelligent and socially directed.
Chapter 10
Why are blushing, frowning, and gestures not expressive in themselves?
Dewey argues these are organic parts of a person's attitude, not expressions made to show something to others; one blushes because capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. Others use the blush or a tightening of muscles as a sign of the person's state and an indication of what course to pursue, so the meaning arises through their use of it.
Chapter 10

Section 114 cards

What does Dewey say is the fundamental means of social control?
The author argues that the fundamental means of control is not personal or "moral" in the sense of direct personal appeal, but intellectual. It consists in habits of understanding set up by using objects in correspondence with others, whether through cooperation or rivalry. Mind is the power to understand things in terms of their use, and a socialized mind understands them in terms of shared situations.
Chapter 11
Why does Dewey call the imitation theory of social control a basic error?
The author argues the current notion of imitation puts the cart before the horse: it takes an effect for a cause. People in a group are like-minded and act alike, but calling this "imitation" merely restates the fact without explaining it. He compares it to saying opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power—an explanation that explains nothing.
Chapter 11
What does Dewey say actually produces the effect attributed to imitation?
The author argues the effect called imitation is mainly the product of conscious instruction and the selective influence of unconscious confirmations and ratifications from associates. Unless one acts as the group does, one is literally out of it; the pressure of being let in or shut out is unremitting. He also notes that persons alike in structure respond the same way to like stimuli, independent of imitation.
Chapter 11
In Dewey's ball-rolling example, what is the child actually imitating?
The child responds to the whole situation—the game being played—not to the other person's action as a model. He wants to keep the game going on his own account, and may note how the other catches the ball to improve his own acts. He imitates the means of doing, not the end. Imitation of ends is superficial; we rebuke children who mimic like parrots.
Chapter 11

Section 124 cards

According to Dewey, what causes the difference between savage and civilized groups?
Dewey argues that native capacities are not appreciably inferior; careful study makes it doubtful that native differences account for cultural differences. Rather, the savage mind is an effect, not a cause, of backward institutions. Their social activities restrict objects of attention and interest, limiting stimuli to mental development. Civilization advances by transforming more natural forces into instrumentalities of action—superior stimuli rather than superior capacities.
Chapter 12
What does Dewey say civilization's material appliances and tools accomplish for education?
Dewey argues appliances do not by themselves constitute civilization—the uses to which they are put are civilization. They free time otherwise spent on livelihood and protection, transmit knowledge verified by physical results, and protect against superstitious beliefs and infertile imaginings. If used in the interests of a truly shared life, they become positive resources of civilization.
Chapter 12
Why does Dewey say language plays a large part in intentional education?
Language represents physical conditions maximally transformed for social life, having lost original quality in becoming social tools. Through it we share vicariously in past human experience, widening and enriching present experience, and we anticipate situations symbolically and imaginatively. Language condenses meanings recording social outcomes and presaging social outlooks—so much so that unlettered and uneducated have become nearly synonymous.
Chapter 12
Why does Dewey claim bookish schooling contradicts its own aim?
Dewey argues that when schools depart from out-of-school educational conditions, they substitute a pseudo-intellectual for a social spirit. Treating learning as a separate conscious business precludes the social sense from shared activity. Isolated intellectual learning may secure motor activity, sensory excitation, or technical ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the intelligence directing ability to useful ends.
Chapter 12

Section 132 cards

How does Dewey describe children's dependence and social capacity?
Dewey argues dependence is positive, not mere helplessness, since it is accompanied by growth in ability rather than parasitism. Physically the child is nearly helpless, inferior to brute young, but this is compensated by social capacity: children are endowed with power to enlist cooperative attention and retain flexible, sensitive responsiveness to others' attitudes. Their alleged egoism is really intensity of interest, or simply egoism running counter to adults' own.
Chapter 13
What does Dewey say schools need for full efficiency?
Dewey argues that while books and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. Schools require, for full efficiency, more opportunity for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so students may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used. This internal control through identity of interest and understanding is the business of education.
Chapter 13

Section 144 cards

What does Dewey say dependence denotes from a social standpoint?
Dewey argues that from a social standpoint dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness, since it involves interdependence. He warns that increased personal independence may decrease social capacity, making a person self-sufficient, aloof, and indifferent, and producing an illusion of being able to stand and act alone—an unnamed form of insanity responsible for much remediable suffering.
Chapter 14
How does Dewey distinguish plasticity from the plasticity of putty or wax?
Dewey says plasticity is not a capacity to take on change of form under external pressure, as putty or wax does. It is deeper than taking on the color of surroundings while keeping one's bent. It is essentially the ability to learn from experience: retaining something from one experience useful in later situations, modifying actions based on prior results, and developing dispositions. Without it, acquiring habits is impossible.
Chapter 14
Why does prolonged infancy matter for social life, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues prolonged infancy matters to adults as well as the young. Dependent, learning beings stimulate nurture and affection; the need for constant care was probably a chief means of transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent unions and forming habits of sympathetic watchfulness essential to associated life. Intellectually it introduced new objects of attention and stimulated foresight and planning. Longer infancy also prolongs plasticity, pushing social progress.
Chapter 14
How does Dewey contrast habituation with active habits using the savage and civilized examples?
Dewey says habituation is relatively passive adjustment to an environment one is not concerned with modifying, which supplies leverage for active habits. Adaptation is as much adapting the environment to our activities as the reverse. A savage tribe on a desert plain adapts by maximum passive acquiescence and minimum active control. A civilized people introduces irrigation, imports plants and animals, and improves them by selection, transforming the environment.
Chapter 14

Section 154 cards

According to Dewey, what does a habit involve beyond motor efficiency?
Dewey argues a habit means formation of intellectual and emotional disposition, not just ease and efficiency of action. Any habit marks an active inclination that seeks occasions for exercise and shows uneasiness when blocked. It also involves an intellectual disposition: acquaintance with materials and a definite way of understanding situations, as in the habits of engineers, architects, or physicians.
Chapter 15
When do habits become routine or enslaving, according to the chapter?
Dewey argues habits degenerate into routine or enslaving ways just in the degree that intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking; bad habits are severed from reason and opposed to conscious deliberation. They end plasticity and the power to vary. Only an environment securing full use of intelligence in forming habits can counteract the tendency toward hardening and settling down.
Chapter 15
What two educational equivalents follow from Dewey's conclusion that life is development?
Dewey concludes that life is development and developing is life. Translated into education, this means (i) the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end, and (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, and transforming. Growth is regarded as an end, not as movement toward a fixed goal.
Chapter 15
What educational failures does Dewey link to the false idea of growth as movement toward a fixed goal?
Dewey links three fallacies to growth as movement toward a fixed goal: the privative view of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and rigidity of habit. Their educational counterparts are failure to account for native powers of the young, failure to develop initiative for novel situations, and undue emphasis on drill securing automatic skill at the expense of personal perception. The adult environment is wrongly made the child's standard.
Chapter 15

Section 164 cards

According to Dewey, what is the finest product of schooling?
The finest product of schooling is the inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living. School education's purpose is to insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that insure growth, since education should not cease when one leaves school.
Chapter 16
How does Dewey redefine immaturity, and what does this mean for instruction?
Dewey argues immaturity should not be defined by fixed comparison with adult accomplishments or seen as a lack of desired traits. Abandoning that view forces us to surrender the habit of thinking of instruction as pouring knowledge into a mental and moral hole awaiting filling. Since life means growth, a living creature lives as fully at one stage as another.
Chapter 16
What two forms do habits take, and how do they relate to growth?
Dewey states habits take the form of habituation, a general and persistent balance of organic activities with surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the latter constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention, and initiative in applying capacities to new aims, and are opposed to routine, which marks an arrest of growth.
Chapter 16
What three undesirable results follow from treating education as preparation?
Dewey identifies: first, loss of impetus, since motive power is not utilized and children live in the present; second, a premium on shilly-shallying and procrastination, because the future prepared for is far off; third, substitution of a conventional average standard of expectation for one concerning the specific powers of the individual. Attention is deflected from the strategic point to an unproductive one.
Chapter 16

Section 173 cards

How does Dewey distinguish genuine growth from the 'unfolding' doctrine of development?
The author argues unfolding treats development as the gradual making explicit of latent powers toward a fixed goal of perfection, making present life merely transitional. Genuine growth, by contrast, is continuous, with present experience meaningful on its own account. Dewey calls the final-goal view the last infirmity of a mind moving from static to dynamic life, since it depreciates present power and opportunity.
Chapter 17
What practical problem does Dewey identify with teaching methods based on 'drawing out' latent powers?
Because the ideal goal is unattainable, teachers substitute some idea they want the child to acquire and use 'suggestive questioning' to draw it out. The pupil, lacking initiative, gropes randomly for what is wanted and forms habits of dependence on others' cues. Dewey argues such methods, claiming a true principle's sanction, may harm more than outright telling, where at least the child decides how much sticks.
Chapter 17
How does Dewey evaluate Froebel's kindergarten symbolism and its influence?
Dewey credits Froebel's recognition of children's native capacities and his influence in spreading the idea of growth as perhaps the most effective single force in modern educational theory. But he argues Froebel conceived development as unfolding a ready-made latent principle, so he set up a completed goal that arrests growth and required abstract symbols, like the circle, as a priori formulae—resulting in an externally imposed scheme of dictation.
Chapter 17

Section 184 cards

What did Hegel's philosophy contribute to educational thought, according to Dewey?
The author argues Hegel's key contribution was recognizing that great historic institutions—language, government, art, religion—are active factors in the intellectual nurture of mind. This destroyed the psychology treating mind as a ready-made possession of a naked individual. Dewey says this marked genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had treated social conditions as not natural.
Chapter 18
How did Hegel's absolute goal affect his view of individuals and education?
Because Hegel was haunted by an absolute goal, he arranged existing institutions on a stepladder of ascending approximations, each absolutely necessary as a stage of absolute mind. Against institutions as they are, individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development means obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions. Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
Chapter 18
How was the organic-whole conception of society used, and what did Dewey object to?
Some of Hegel's followers reconciled Whole and individuality by conceiving society as an organism. Dewey grants social organization is presupposed in individual capacity, but argues the bodily-organism analogy assigns each person a fixed limited place and function, giving philosophic sanction to class distinctions. In education this again means external dictation instead of growth.
Chapter 18
What is the theory of formal discipline, and what does Dewey say is wrong with it?
Formal discipline holds that faculties like perceiving, retaining, recalling, and thinking exist in crude form and are perfected by repeated graded exercise, as Locke described. Dewey says it has a correct ideal—education should create specific powers—but takes a short cut, treating these powers as direct conscious aims of instruction rather than results of growth.
Chapter 18

Section 193 cards

Why did Locke's faculty psychology seem practically useful to educators?
The author explains that it appeared to give the educator definite rather than vague tasks, making a technique of instruction relatively easy. One need only provide sufficient practice of each power through repeated acts of attending, observing, memorizing, and so on, grading the difficulty so each set of repetitions exceeds the last, and a complete scheme of instruction is evolved.
Chapter 19
What is Dewey's first criticism of the supposed original faculties?
The author argues the supposed original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, and thinking are purely mythological—there are no ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and trained. Instead there are many original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action based on neural connections, but these are of indefinite variety, interweave subtly, and are not latent intellectual powers requiring only exercise.
Chapter 19
How does training original impulsive activities actually work, according to Dewey?
The author argues training is not refinement by exercise like strengthening a muscle. It consists in selecting, from diffused responses evoked at a given time, those especially adapted to utilizing the stimulus—eliminating the rest or no training occurs. It also involves coordinating different factors of response, such as linking particular visual stimuli to grasping reactions, then bringing temperature, sound, and vocal responses into the system.
Chapter 19

Section 204 cards

Why does Dewey say highly specialized training yields less educative quality?
Dewey argues that the more narrowly response and stimulus are adjusted to each other, the more rigid and less generally available the training becomes. The more a pupil confines himself to fixating word forms apart from meaning and context, the less he can use that ability elsewhere. The connections needed for other observations are deliberately eliminated and cannot be restored when needed.
Chapter 20
What is the fundamental fallacy of the formal discipline theory?
Dewey argues the fundamental fallacy is dualism: separating activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no ability to see, hear, or remember in general, only the ability to see, hear, or remember something. Training a mental or physical power apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise is, he says, nonsense.
Chapter 20
How does Dewey compare narrow spelling drills to games and sports?
Dewey compares narrow spelling training, which takes visual forms in a narrow context, to gymnasium pulley-weight exercises that develop muscles uniformly and mechanically. A game or sport is varied from moment to moment, meets novel emergencies, and keeps coordinations flexible and elastic. Its training is therefore more general, covering a wider territory and more factors.
Chapter 20
What criterion does Dewey give for selecting subject matter to observe and recall?
Dewey argues the criterion must be social: we want a person to note, recall, and judge things that make him an effective, competent member of the group he is associated with. Otherwise we might as well have pupils observe cracks on a wall or memorize meaningless word lists. Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief obstruction to general training of mind.
Chapter 20

Section 214 cards

What does Dewey say is the result of the educative process?
Dewey argues that the result of education is capacity for further education, meaning growth continues rather than ending at a fixed goal. This contrasts with ideas like preparation for a future duty, unfolding from within, and training of mental faculties. Each contrasting view, he argues, diverts attention from the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.
Chapter 21
How does Dewey criticize the unfolding theory of Froebel and Hegel?
Dewey says the unfolding theory resembles growth but ignores interaction of present organic tendencies with the present environment. It treats some implicit whole as given ready-made, so growth becomes merely transitory, a means of making explicit what is already implicit. Froebel relies on mystic symbolic values of objects and acts; Hegel relies on existing institutions as actual representatives, diverting perception from direct growth of experience.
Chapter 21
What is Herbart's theory of education as formation?
Herbart denies innate faculties absolutely. The mind produces qualitatively different reactions called presentations in response to realities acting on it. Presentations persist, may be driven below the threshold of consciousness, and continue by inherent momentum. Faculties like attention, memory, and perception are arrangements formed by interaction of submerged presentations with new ones. Mind is wholly a matter of contents, formed by subject matter presented from without.
Chapter 21
What three educational implications does Dewey draw from Herbart's doctrine?
First, a kind of mind is formed by objects evoking particular reactions, so forming mind is wholly a matter of presenting proper educational materials. Second, earlier presentations are apperceiving organs controlling assimilation of new ones, so the educator selects original material and sequences later presentations; control comes from the past, not a goal. Third, formal teaching steps follow: preparation, presentation, interaction, application, uniformly for all subjects and pupils.
Chapter 21

Section 224 cards

What does Dewey say the theory that mind is what has been taught reflects?
The author argues it reflects the pedagogue's view of life: it is eloquent about the teacher's duty to instruct but almost silent about his privilege of learning. It emphasizes intellectual environment over personal sharing in common experiences, exaggerates conscious methods, and underestimates vital unconscious attitudes, taking everything educational into account except vital energy seeking effective exercise.
Chapter 22
What does cultural recapitulation theory claim about children's education?
It claims children at a certain age are in the mental and moral condition of savagery, with vagrant and predatory instincts because ancestors once lived that way. Consequently their proper subject matter is material like myths, folk-tale, and song produced in the analogous stage, then stages like the pastoral, until reaching contemporary culture. Dewey notes it had little currency outside a small German Herbartian school.
Chapter 22
Why does Dewey call the biological basis of recapitulation fallacious?
The author argues embryonic growth preserves some traits of lower life forms but never strictly traverses past stages. If a strict law of repetition existed, evolutionary development could not have taken place, since each generation would simply repeat its predecessors. Development occurred through shortcuts and alterations, suggesting education should emancipate the young from dwelling in an outgrown past rather than lead them to recapitulate it.
Chapter 22
How does Dewey define heredity for educational purposes?
The author argues heredity means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an individual; how it was produced or from which ancestry is less important to the educator than that it now exists. Heredity is thus a limit of education, preventing wasted effort trying to make someone what he is not naturally fitted to become, but it does not determine what use shall be made of existing capacities.
Chapter 22

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According to Dewey, when does knowledge of the past have educational significance?
Dewey argues that knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance only when it enters into the present; otherwise it is not. Making the records and remains of the past the main material of education cuts the vital connection between present and past, making the past a rival of the present and culture an ornament, refuge, or asylum rather than an agency for ripening present crudities.
Chapter 23
What distinguishes a genuinely educative experience from routine and capricious activity?
Dewey says a genuinely educative experience, conveying instruction and increasing ability, is contradistinguished from routine activity on one hand and capricious activity on the other. Capricious activity lets consequences go unconnected to the act, often arising from external dictation; routine activity may increase skill but does not widen the meaning-horizon, and an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous when the environment changes.
Chapter 23
How does Dewey illustrate the increment of meaning in an educative experience?
Dewey uses a child who reaches for a bright light and gets burned: henceforth the child knows that touching connected with seeing means heat and pain, or that a certain light means a source of heat. The acts by which a scientific man learns more about flame differ no whit in principle—by doing certain things he makes perceptible connections previously ignored.
Chapter 23

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How does Dewey's idea of education as continuous reconstruction identify the end and the process?
The author argues that education as continuous reconstruction identifies the end (result) and the process, which is only verbally self-contradictory. Experience as an active process occupies time; its later period completes its earlier portion and brings to light connections hitherto unperceived. The later outcome reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the whole experience establishes a disposition toward things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous experience is educative, and all education resides in having such experiences.
Chapter 24
What two traits does Dewey derive his standard for judging social groups from?
Dewey argues that in any social group, even a gang of thieves, there is some interest held in common and some interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits he derives the standard: how numerous and varied are the consciously shared interests, and how full and free is the interplay with other forms of association. Applying this to a criminal band, its ties reduce almost to a common interest in plunder and isolate it from other groups, so its education is partial and distorted.
Chapter 24
How does Dewey distinguish education in static versus progressive societies?
Dewey argues that in static societies, which make maintenance of established custom their measure of value, education is largely catching the child up with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. Progressive communities instead shape the experiences of the young so that better habits are formed rather than current habits reproduced, making the future adult society an improvement on their own. Dewey says we are far from realizing education's potential as a constructive agency for improving society.
Chapter 24
Why does Dewey criticize the Herbartian theory of formation through presentations?
Dewey says the defect of the Herbartian theory of formation through presentations consists in slighting the constant interaction and change between native activities and the environment. Early experiences do not consist of externally presented material but of interaction of native activities with the environment, which progressively modifies both the activities and the environment. The same criticism applies to theories finding primary subject matter in cultural and literary products isolated from the present environment; their value lies in increasing the meaning of present affairs.
Chapter 24

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What two elements form Dewey's criterion for judging a mode of social life?
Dewey's criterion has two parts: first, whether the interests of a group are shared by a large number of members and whether there is free interplay among them; second, whether the group interacts freely with other groups and readjusts its habits through that contact. Both elements, he argues, point toward democracy as the associated form of life.
Chapter 25
Why does Dewey say a despotically governed state still involves some common interest?
Dewey argues that governors must appeal to the native activities of the governed, calling some powers into play; even fear can produce caution and prudence, not only cowardice. The real defect is that the appeal to fear is isolated, so many capacities are perverted into mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
Chapter 25
How does Dewey define a slave, following Plato?
Dewey cites Plato's definition of a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. He argues this condition exists even without legal slavery, wherever people do socially serviceable work whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
Chapter 25
What does Dewey say isolation does to a group's ideals and habits?
Dewey argues that isolation and exclusiveness make for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, producing static and selfish ideals within the group. Groups with interests of their own that shut out wider interaction aim at protecting what they have rather than reorganizing through wider relationships. He extends this to nations, families, schools, and class divisions.
Chapter 25

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Why does Dewey say democracy is devoted to education beyond the suffrage argument?
Dewey calls the suffrage explanation superficial: popular government needs educated voters since it repudiates external authority and must rely on voluntary disposition and interest. The deeper reason is that democracy is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience, not merely a form of government. Shared interests across class, race, and national barriers multiply stimuli and liberate diverse personal capacities.
Chapter 26
What caused the widening of shared concerns and individualization Dewey describes?
The author argues these were not products of deliberation or conscious effort but resulted from modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication flowing from command of science over natural energy. Only after this greater individualization and broader community of interest exist does it become a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend them through education.
Chapter 26
What must a mobile democratic society ensure about its members' education?
A society stratified into separate classes would be fatal to democracy, so intellectual opportunities must be accessible to all on equable and easy terms; a class-divided society need attend only to educating its ruling elements. A mobile society full of channels for distributing change must educate members to personal initiative and adaptability, lest they be overwhelmed by changes whose significance they cannot perceive.
Chapter 26
What limits did Dewey identify in Plato's educational philosophy?
Dewey credits Plato with seeing that society is stable when each does work suited to natural aptitude, and that education discovers and trains these aptitudes for social use. But Plato, lacking a conception of the indefinite plurality of activities, held that individuals fall by nature into a very small number of classes—three types of faculties—so education reaches a static limit in each class, since only diversity makes change and progress.
Chapter 26

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How does Dewey characterize the eighteenth-century individualistic ideal?
Dewey says its seeming antisocial philosophy was a transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society—cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity; extreme individualism was the obverse of ideals of indefinite perfectibility and a society as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to be the organ of a comprehensive, progressive society.
Chapter 27

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In Dewey's account, what did education become under German influence after Napoleon?
Dewey explains that under German thought education became a civic function identified with realizing the ideal of the national state. The state replaced humanity and cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism; the aim became forming the citizen, not the "man." This shift followed the Napoleonic conquests, when German states used education to recover and maintain political integrity and power.
Chapter 28
How did educational philosophy reconcile culture with state subordination?
Dewey says the ideal of culture as complete development of personality persisted, so philosophy reconciled it with discipline through the "organic" conception of the state. The individual in isolation is nothing; only by absorbing the aims of organized institutions does he attain true personality. Apparent subordination is really making his own the objective reason manifested in the state. Dewey ties this to Hegelian institutional idealism.
Chapter 28
What did Kant's Pedagogics say about who should conduct education?
Dewey notes Kant defined education as the process by which man becomes man, with each generation inclined to educate for the present world rather than a better humanity. Kant held that enlightened men in their private capacity must conduct education, since rulers want subjects as tools for their own purposes; even ruler subsidies to private schools must be carefully safeguarded.
Chapter 28
What two conclusions does Dewey draw from this historical survey?
First, terms like individual and social conceptions of education are meaningless apart from context: Plato's ideal lost the individual in class, eighteenth-century individualism carried a generous social ideal, and German idealism made the national state an intermediary. Second, a fundamental problem for democratic education is the conflict between a nationalistic and a wider social aim, since Europe harnessed education to narrow national interests.
Chapter 28

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What contradiction does Dewey identify in modern social life?
Dewey argues that science, commerce, and art are international in quality and method, involving cooperation among peoples of different countries, yet the idea of national sovereignty has never been more accentuated in politics. Each nation lives in suppressed hostility with neighbors and is assumed to have exclusively its own interests. This contradiction, he says, demands a clearer conception of the meaning of "social" as a function and test of education.
Chapter 29
How should education address relations between nations, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues it is not enough to teach the horrors of war and avoid stimulating international jealousy. Emphasis must be placed on whatever binds people together in cooperative human pursuits apart from geographical limitations. The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty, in respect to fuller and freer association among all human beings, must be instilled as a working disposition of mind.
Chapter 29
What two criteria does Dewey use to measure the worth of a form of social life?
Dewey states the two points are the extent to which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society sets up internal and external barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A democratic society provides participation in its good for all members on equal terms and secures flexible readjustment of institutions through interaction of different forms of associated life.
Chapter 29

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According to Dewey, what distinguishes an end from a mere result?
Dewey contrasts mere results with ends: the wind shifting desert sand produces an effect, but no end, because nothing in the outcome completes or fulfills what preceded it. The bees' activities, by contrast, are ends because each step prepares the next and the termination summarizes and finishes the process—even without conscious design.
Chapter 30
What are the three ways foresight of an end functions in activity?
Dewey says foresight functions in three connected ways: it involves careful observation of given conditions to identify available means and hindrances; it suggests the proper order or sequence in using means, aiding economical selection and arrangement; and it makes choice among alternatives possible, letting us compare and judge the relative desirability of predicted outcomes.
Chapter 30
Why does Dewey call it nonsense to speak of an educational aim under certain conditions?
Dewey argues an aim requires orderly activity with intrinsic continuity and cumulative growth, plus conditions permitting foresight of results. So talking of an educational aim is nonsense when each pupil's act is dictated by the teacher, with order coming only from assignments and directions—and equally fatal is capricious, discontinuous action defended as spontaneous self-expression.
Chapter 30
How does Dewey connect acting with an aim to acting intelligently and to 'having a mind'?
Dewey concludes that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. To foresee a terminus is to have a basis for observing, selecting, and ordering objects and capacities. Mind, he argues, is intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and their relations; having a mind to do something means foreseeing a possibility and forming a plan accounting for resources and difficulties.
Chapter 30

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What does Dewey say consciousness actually is, rather than an entity?
Dewey argues that "consciousness" comes from the adjective "conscious" and should not be made into an entity. To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; it names the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. It is not something that idly gazes at surroundings or receives impressions from physical things, but a name for the purposeful quality of activity directed by an aim.
Chapter 31
What is Dewey's first criterion of a good aim?
The aim must grow out of existing conditions, based on what is already going on and on the resources and difficulties of the situation. Dewey argues that educational and moral theories often violate this by assuming ends lying outside our activities, supplied from some external source. Such aims limit intelligence, since being ready-made they must be imposed by authority, leaving intelligence only a mechanical choice of means.
Chapter 31
Why must an aim be flexible rather than fixed?
Dewey says an aim first emerges as a tentative sketch, and striving to realize it tests its worth. Usually acting on it reveals overlooked conditions, so it must be added to and subtracted from. An aim must therefore be flexible and alterable. An externally imposed end is rigid: action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it, and failure is blamed on perverse conditions rather than the unreasonable end.
Chapter 31
How does Dewey distinguish ends and means in activity?
Dewey argues that an end growing within an activity is both end and means, the distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end until attained; every end becomes a means of carrying activity further once achieved. An externally imposed end, by contrast, is fixed and possessed, making activity a mere necessary evil. Divorcing end from means diminishes the activity's significance and tends to reduce it to drudgery.
Chapter 31

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According to Dewey, who or what actually has educational aims?
The author argues that education as such has no aims; only persons—parents, teachers, and educators—have aims. These purposes vary with different children and change as children grow and as the teacher's experience grows. Even the most valid aims put into words are not aims but suggestions for how to observe, look ahead, and choose in directing the energies of concrete situations.
Chapter 32
What is Dewey's first characteristic of a good educational aim?
An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs of the given individual being educated, including original instincts and acquired habits. Dewey warns against aims like preparation that omit existing powers, and against uniform aims that neglect individual capacities. Adult accomplishments are useful as a context for surveying childhood activities, but should not be set up as fixed aims apart from those activities.
Chapter 32
What must a good aim be capable of, according to Dewey's second characteristic?
An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating with the activities of those being instructed. It must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberate and organize their capacities. Unless it leads to specific procedures that test, correct, and amplify the aim, it is worthless. A rigid aim seems to make careful attention to concrete conditions unnecessary, excluding everything that does not fit the fixed end.
Chapter 32
Why does Dewey say externally imposed ends are harmful?
Teachers receive aims from superior authorities, who accept them from community currents, and impose them on children. As a result, the teacher's intelligence is confined to receiving aims from above rather than engaging closely with the pupil's mind and subject matter. This distrust of the teacher's experience reflects into lack of confidence in pupils' responses, who receive aims through double or treble imposition and are confused by conflict with their own experience.
Chapter 32

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What does Dewey say a true aim is opposed to?
Dewey argues a true aim is opposed at every point to an aim imposed on a process of action from without. The imposed aim is fixed and rigid, an externally dictated order rather than a stimulus to intelligence in the given situation. It is remote and divorced from the means of reaching it, and instead of suggesting freer, better balanced activity, it sets a limit to activity.
Chapter 33
Why do epochs emphasize in their stated aims what they actually lack?
Dewey argues that people frame explicit aims on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation, taking for granted whatever is going reasonably well. So a generation tends to emphasize consciously just what it has least of in actual fact: a time of domination by authority calls out individual freedom, while one of disorganized individual activities calls for social control as an educational aim.
Chapter 33
What are Rousseau's three sources of education?
Rousseau says education comes from Nature, men, and things: the spontaneous development of our organs and capacities is Nature's education; the use we are taught to put this development to comes from men; and personal experience from surrounding objects comes from things. Only when these three are consonant and aim at the same end does a person tend toward the true goal, which is Nature's.
Chapter 33
What is Dewey's criticism of Rousseau's natural development doctrine?
Dewey says Rousseau's three factors are sound, but Rousseau treats them as separate and independent rather than factors that must work together. Rousseau believes native organs develop spontaneously apart from any use, and that social education should be subordinated to this. Dewey objects: using native activities in accord with themselves differs from supposing they develop normally apart from use. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle would make children's babblings the standard for teaching language.
Chapter 33

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Where does Dewey say Rousseau was right and where profoundly wrong?
Dewey argues Rousseau was right that the structure and activities of organs furnish the conditions of all teaching in their use, but profoundly wrong in intimating that they also supply the ends of development. Native powers furnish initiating and limiting forces in education, not its ends or aims. Dewey calls the notion of spontaneous normal development pure mythology.
Chapter 34
Why did Rousseau believe original powers are wholly good, according to Dewey?
Dewey says Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due to his identifying God with Nature; to Rousseau the original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and good creator. Dewey paraphrases: God made the original organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put. Rousseau saw social interference with Nature as the primary source of corruption.
Chapter 34
What four specific aims does Dewey derive from natural development?
Dewey lists: (1) attention to bodily organs, health and vigor; (2) respect for physical mobility, since children are always in motion and a sedentary life is injurious; (3) regard for individual differences among children in quality and arrangement of native powers; (4) noting the origin, waxing and waning of preferences and interests, striking while the iron is hot.
Chapter 34
How should adults treat children's spontaneous tendencies, per Dewey?
Dewey says observation of natural tendencies is difficult under restraint; they show best in spontaneous sayings and doings when not at set tasks or under observation. It does not follow that all natural tendencies are desirable, but since they are operative they must be taken account of. Desirable ones should be kept active; many troubling tendencies are transitory, and too much direct attention may fix them.
Chapter 34

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Why did the doctrine of following nature combine two unrelated factors?
Dewey explains that the doctrine joined a psychological protest against abstract, uniform faculties of mind with a political rebellion against existing social institutions. The first substituted specific instincts and capacities differing by individual; the second, drawn from Rousseau, treated organized social life as artificial and harmful. Dewey notes modern biology and psychology reinforced the first side, while the political side rested on Rousseau's contrast between natural and civilized man.
Chapter 35
What error does Dewey find in Rousseau's conclusion about nature and environment?
Dewey grants that evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a wrong education which careful schooling cannot offset. But he argues the conclusion should not be education apart from environment; rather it should be to provide an environment in which native powers are put to better uses. The author thus rejects Rousseau's notion that nature supplies not only initiating forces but also the plan and goal of growth.
Chapter 35
How does Dewey define adequate social efficiency in education?
Dewey argues social efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having social meaning. He identifies industrial competency as a specific aim: persons must earn a living and use the products of industry rightly, and higher education has often scorned these basics. But he warns against accepting existing economic conditions as final or fitting individuals in advance for definite callings based on parents' wealth or status.
Chapter 35
Why does Dewey oppose training for too specific an industrial calling?
Dewey argues industry changes rapidly through new inventions, so new industries spring up and old ones are revolutionized. Training for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its purpose, because when methods change such individuals are left behind with less ability to readjust than those with broader training. A democratic criterion requires developing capacity to the point of competency to choose and make one's own career, correcting unfair privilege and deprivation rather than perpetuating them.
Chapter 35

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How does Dewey define social efficiency in its broadest sense?
The author argues social efficiency means the capacity to share in a give and take of experience—making one's own experience more worthwhile to others and participating more richly in theirs. It includes art, recreation, and significant use of leisure, and is a socialization of mind that breaks down barriers of social stratification. Confined to overt acts, it omits its chief constituent: intelligent sympathy or good will.
Chapter 36
What does Dewey say distinguishes genuine sympathy from mere benevolent interest in others?
The author argues sympathy is more than mere feeling: it is a cultivated imagination for what people have in common and a rebellion against whatever unnecessarily divides them. Benevolent interest in others can be an unwitting mask for dictating what their good should be, rather than freeing them to seek and find the good of their own choice.
Chapter 36
Why does Dewey call the opposition between personality and social efficiency a feudal product?
The author argues this opposition arose in a feudally organized society with rigid divisions: superiors had leisure to develop as human beings while inferiors supplied external products. Urging efficiency as mere output in a would-be democracy carries over that aristocratic depreciation of the masses. Democracy instead demands a social return from all and opportunity for all to develop distinctive capacities; separating the aims is fatal to democracy.
Chapter 36
How does Dewey define culture at the end of the chapter?
The author argues culture means something cultivated and ripened, opposed to the raw and crude, and personal—cultivation in appreciation of ideas, art, and broad human interests. He concludes there is perhaps no better definition than that culture is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of meanings.
Chapter 36

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How does Dewey distinguish a spectator's attitude from a participant's?
The spectator is indifferent to what happens, since each result is merely something to look at. The participant is bound up with events; outcomes make a difference to his fortunes, so he feels solicitude and acts to secure better and avert worse consequences. Dewey says interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected.
Chapter 37
What three meanings does Dewey give to the word 'interest'?
Dewey lists: (i) an occupation or pursuit, as when a man's interest is politics or banking; (ii) the point at which an object engages a man and affects his affairs, like a silent partner's stake in a business; (iii) the personal attitude of being absorbed in, alert to, and caring about an object.
Chapter 37
Why does Dewey reject the 'soft pedagogy' criticism of interest?
Critics exaggerate and isolate interest's second meaning, treating it as mere pleasure or pain tied to personal advantage, so interest becomes a seductive bribe added to indifferent material. Dewey says the objection assumes subject matter is irrelevant to pupils' normal activities. The remedy is finding objects and modes of action connected with present powers, not faulting the doctrine of interest.
Chapter 37
According to Dewey, why can't intellectual foresight be separated from emotional and volitional concern?
Dewey says we may call objective foresight intellectual and personal concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts. Personal attitudes are always responses to what is going on in a shared situation, and their success depends on interaction with other changes. Interest means self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation.
Chapter 37

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According to Dewey, what does the word 'interest' etymologically suggest in education?
Dewey states that 'interest' etymologically suggests what is between—that which connects two things otherwise distant. In education the distance is temporal: the pupil's present powers are the initial stage, the teacher's aim is the remote limit, and between them lie means such as acts to perform, difficulties to overcome, and appliances to use. These intermediate conditions are of interest because development of present activities into the desired end depends on them.
Chapter 38
How does Dewey distinguish obstinacy from genuine strength of will?
Dewey argues obstinacy is persistence but not strength of volition; it may be mere animal inertia, with a person continuing just because he started. The obstinate man declines to make his proposed end clear, fearing it might not be worth while, and resists criticizing ends. The really executive man ponders his ends and makes the results of his actions clear and full. Dewey says the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual.
Chapter 38
What does Dewey mean by discipline, and is it positive or negative?
Dewey defines discipline as power at command—mastery of resources for carrying through an action undertaken. It combines ability to consider actions deliberately with power to endure in an intelligently chosen course despite distraction and difficulty. Discipline is positive: to know what one is to do and move promptly with requisite means. Cow the spirit, subdue inclination, compel obedience, mortify the flesh—these are disciplinary only if they develop power to recognize what one is about and persist.
Chapter 38
Why does Dewey claim interest and discipline are connected rather than opposed?
Dewey argues even the intellectual phase of trained power—apprehending what one is doing through consequences—is impossible without interest, since deliberation is superficial where nothing touches the learner. Interest is also requisite for executive persistence: employers do not seek workmen uninterested in their work, and no one hires a lawyer or doctor expecting conscientiousness from mere obligation. Interest measures, or rather is, the depth of the grip the foreseen end has upon one.
Chapter 38

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How does Dewey define mind in relation to experience?
The author argues mind is not a self-contained entity but the ability to respond to present stimuli based on anticipation of future consequences, with a view to controlling them. It is a name for a course of action insofar as that action is intelligently directed, involving aims and selection of means. A person is intelligent only insofar as their activities have these qualities.
Chapter 39
What does Dewey's typewriter illustration demonstrate about intelligence?
When typing skillfully, formed habits handle physical movements, freeing thought for the topic. When unskilled or the machine malfunctions, one must attend selectively to keys, written words, and mechanism—not to every detail indifferently. Attention centers on whatever bears on the occupation, with look ahead. This foresight and survey of means and hindrances constitute mind; action without forecast is habit or blind, not intelligent.
Chapter 39
What error does Dewey identify in past conceptions of mind and subject matter?
The author argues these conceptions are mythical: mind is set over against the world as something existing in isolation with independent mental states, and knowledge becomes either external application of mind to things, impressions made by outside subject matter, or a combination. Subject matter is treated as complete in itself, just something to be learned. The facts of interest refute these views.
Chapter 39
What is the problem of instruction according to Dewey?
Instruction must find material that engages a person in specific activities with an aim or purpose of moment or interest to them, treating things as conditions for attaining ends rather than gymnastic appliances. The remedy for formal discipline's evils is not specialized disciplines but reforming the notion of mind and its training—discovering typical modes of activity, play or useful occupations, where individuals have something at stake and must reflect and judge.
Chapter 39

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How did labeling studies "disciplinary" shield them from criticism, per Dewey?
The author argues that calling traditional studies "disciplinary" stifled every question and doubt, removing them from rational discussion. Since the allegation could not be checked up, the material never had to meet specific tests or serve particular ends. If a pupil failed or grew lax, the fault was assigned to the pupil, not the study or teaching methods, so old methods were retained.
Chapter 40
What is the negative conception of discipline Dewey criticizes?
The author argues discipline gets wrongly identified with mere strain: a mind applies itself to indifferent material, and the more uncongenial the subject matter, the more discipline is supposedly required. Application for its own sake, or for training alone, is treated as alone disciplinary. Dewey quotes an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn't like it."
Chapter 40
How does traditional education treat subject matter, according to Dewey?
In traditional schemes, subject matter means so much material to be studied. Branches of study—history, algebra, geography—are independent groups of facts, each with principles of arrangement complete within itself, having a ready-made existence on their own account. The school program consists of "studies" marked off from one another, each supposed to be complete by itself for educational purposes.
Chapter 40
What does Dewey say makes something an object of study?
The author argues anything intelligence studies represents things in the part they play in carrying forward active lines of interest. A fact becomes an object of study when it figures as a factor in completing a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. Numbers matter not because they form mathematics but because they are factors on which accomplishing purposes depends.
Chapter 40

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According to Dewey, what two phases combine to constitute experience?
Dewey argues experience combines an active and a passive element. On the active side, experience is trying, made explicit in the term experiment; on the passive side, it is undergoing. We act upon something, then suffer or undergo the consequences. The connection between these two phases measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience, and mere activity alone does not constitute experience.
Chapter 41
Why does Dewey say a child sticking a finger in flame is not yet experience?
Dewey argues it is not experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it becomes experience when the movement is connected with the pain he undergoes in consequence. Being burned alone is a mere physical change, like a stick of wood burning, unless perceived as a consequence of some other action. Only then does sticking a finger into flame mean a burn.
Chapter 41
What does Dewey mean by learning from experience?
Dewey argues learning from experience means making a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying, an experiment with the world to find out what it is like, and the undergoing becomes instruction, the discovery of the connection of things.
Chapter 41
How does Dewey define interest and its relation to discipline?
Dewey argues interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity having an aim. Interest means one is identified with the objects defining the activity and furnishing its means and obstacles. Any aim implies an earlier incomplete phase and a later completing phase, plus intermediate steps. The time gap between them exacts effort, demanding continuity of attention and endurance; this attitude is practically meant by will, and discipline is its fruit.
Chapter 41

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What two conclusions about experience does Dewey draw for education?
Dewey concludes that experience is primarily an active-passive affair, not primarily cognitive; and that the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads. Cognition is included only insofar as experience is cumulative, amounts to something, or has meaning.
Chapter 42
According to Dewey, what causes the 'problem of discipline' in schools?
The author argues the chief source is the dualism that divorces bodily activity from mental activity. Since the body brings energy that is not used in significant occupations, it becomes a distraction to be suppressed. Teachers spend much time enforcing physical quietude, silence, and rigid uniformity, punishing inevitable deviations and producing nervous strain.
Chapter 42
How does Dewey say senses and muscles should function in learning?
The author argues senses and muscles should be organic participants in having an instructive experience, not external inlets and outlets of mind. Before school, a child learns through hand, eye, and ear as organs of purposeful doing, as when flying a kite. Isolating sensory-motor acts from purpose makes them mechanical, establishing habits that hinder later intelligent reading.
Chapter 42
What does Dewey claim about perception, ideas, and judgment?
The author argues it is wrong to separate perceptions and ideas from judgment, as though the mind first perceives things apart from relations and then judges among isolated items. Every perception and idea already involves a sense of bearings, use, and cause. Knowing a chair or wagon means grasping connections, not inventorying isolated qualities.
Chapter 42

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According to Dewey, when do words and symbols replace ideas?
Dewey argues that words, the counters for ideals, are easily mistaken for ideas. This substitution occurs when mental activity is separated from active concern with the world—from doing something and connecting the doing with what is undergone. Because some meaning is still recognized, the swap is subtle, and people become trained to accept a minimum of meaning, mistaking half-perceptions for genuine ideas.
Chapter 43
What does Dewey mean by reflective experience versus trial and error?
Dewey says all experience contains a cut-and-try phase, the trial-and-error method of acting until something works and then adopting it as a rule of thumb. In reflective experience, observation is pushed further: we analyze the details linking cause and effect, activity and consequence. This insight makes foresight more accurate and extends practical control, since we can supply missing conditions or eliminate superfluous causes.
Chapter 43
How does Dewey define thinking as a distinctive experience?
Dewey defines thinking as the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something we do and the consequences that result, so the two become continuous. This cancels their isolation and arbitrary pairing, producing a unified developing situation that is understood and explained. Thinking is thus an explicit rendering of the intelligent element in experience, making it possible to act with an end in view and to have aims.
Chapter 43
What two opposites of thoughtful action does Dewey identify?
Dewey identifies routine and capricious behavior as opposites of thoughtful action. Routine accepts what has been customary as the full measure of possibility and ignores the connections of particular things done. Capricious behavior treats the momentary act as the measure of value and ignores connections between personal action and environmental energies. Both refuse responsibility for future consequences; reflection is the acceptance of that responsibility.
Chapter 43

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According to Dewey, what is the starting point of any process of thinking?
Dewey states that thinking begins with something going on that is incomplete or unfulfilled; its meaning lies in what it is going to be and how it will turn out. Merely filling our heads with finished items, like a scrapbook, is not thinking but turning ourselves into registering apparatus. Thinking instead considers the bearing of occurrences on what may be but is not yet.
Chapter 44
What paradox of thought does Dewey identify, and how does he resolve it?
Dewey argues thinking is born in partiality—we identify with an outcome—yet to accomplish its tasks it must achieve detached impartiality. Hopes and desires motivate reflection but must not modify observations and reasonings. He sees no incompatibility: the occasion of reflection lies in personal sharing, while its value lies in keeping oneself out of the data.
Chapter 44
How does Dewey answer the Greek dilemma about how learning is possible?
The Greek dilemma holds we either know already or do not, making learning impossible either way. Dewey says it overlooks the twilight zone of inquiry: perplexities suggest ways out, we try them tentatively, and either push through—knowing we found what we sought—or grow more confused, knowing we remain ignorant. Tentative, hypothetical conclusions are what the dilemma missed.
Chapter 44
What does Dewey mean by saying all thinking is research and involves risk?
Because thinking arises in doubtful, unfinished situations, it is inquiry—seeking something not at hand—so acquiring is secondary and instrumental. Dewey claims all thinking is research, original to the one carrying it on, even if everyone else already knows. Since certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance, conclusions are tentative or hypothetical until confirmed by events.
Chapter 44

Section 454 cards

What are the five features of a reflective experience, in order?
Dewey lists: (i) perplexity, confusion, doubt from being in an incomplete situation; (ii) a conjectural anticipation or tentative interpretation of the given elements; (iii) a careful survey, examination, and analysis of all attainable considerations; (iv) elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and consistent; (v) taking a stand on the hypothesis as a plan of action, applied and thereby tested.
Chapter 45
What distinguishes reflective experience from gross trial and error?
Dewey argues it is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four—the careful survey of conditions and the elaboration of the hypothesis—that mark off reflective experience from trial and error. Yet he insists we never wholly escape the trial and error situation: even our most rationally consistent thought must be tried in the world, and can never cover all connections or consequences with perfect accuracy.
Chapter 45
According to Dewey, what is thinking and what is its stimulus?
Dewey defines thinking as the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences, making the connecting links explicit as relationships. The stimulus to thinking arises when we wish to determine the significance of some act, performed or to be performed, and so anticipate consequences—implying the situation as it stands is incomplete and hence indeterminate.
Chapter 45
What fundamental fallacy in instruction does Dewey identify?
Dewey argues the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction lies in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed. He insists on an actual empirical situation as the initiating phase of thought—trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do something in return. Beginning with ready-made subject matter, irrespective of direct personal experience, is the fallacy; even kindergarten and Montessori techniques tend to rush past crude handling of familiar material.
Chapter 45

Section 464 cards

How should a school subject first be approached to arouse thought rather than mere words?
Dewey argues the first approach to any school subject should be as unscholastic as possible, recalling the situations and occupations of ordinary life outside school. Successful methods in arithmetic, reading, geography, physics, or foreign language work because they return to the type of situation that causes reflection in everyday life: they give pupils something to do, not something to learn, and learning naturally results.
Chapter 46
What two questions help distinguish genuine problems from simulated or mock problems?
Dewey offers two overlapping tests: (a) Is there anything but a problem—does the question naturally arise within some situation or personal experience, or is it aloof, existing only to convey instruction? (b) Is it the pupil's own problem, or the teacher's or textbook's problem made his only by marks, promotion, or approval? Together they ask whether the experience inherently stimulates observation and inference, or is imposed from without.
Chapter 46
Why does Dewey say the pupil's problems are often his only as a pupil, not as a human being?
Because schoolrooms lack the materials and occupations that generate real problems, pupils' problems become meeting the teacher's requirements in recitation, examination, and deportment. Subject matter is no longer directly engaged; the real objects of study become school conventions and authority. At worst, the pupil's problem is merely seeming to meet requirements, producing judgment Dewey says is not a desirable addition to character.
Chapter 46
What must accompany a difficulty for it to stimulate thinking rather than overwhelm pupils?
Dewey holds that a difficulty is indispensable to thinking, but not all difficulties call out thought—some overwhelm and discourage. The perplexing situation must sufficiently resemble situations already dealt with so pupils have some control of meanings for handling it. The art of instruction lies in making new problems large enough to challenge thought yet small enough that familiar spots remain from which helpful suggestions may spring.
Chapter 46

Section 474 cards

According to Dewey, what is the proper role of information or knowledge in education?
Dewey argues information is the working capital and indispensable resource for further inquiry, not an end in itself. Treating knowledge as a static, cold-storage ideal to be heaped up and displayed is inimical to educative development: it swamps thinking and leaves pupils without criteria for selecting what is appropriate. If information actually functioned in experience, more varied resources would likely be needed.
Chapter 47
How does Dewey distinguish observation, reading, and being told as sources of data?
Dewey holds the psychological source of data is largely indifferent; the right proportion depends on the particular problem. Direct observation is more vivid but limited, and excessive reliance on sense-presentations can cripple thought. Yet students must learn to supplement personal experience with others' experiences. Most objectionable is when books or teachers supply ready-made solutions instead of material the student must adapt himself.
Chapter 47
What does Dewey mean by saying inference is a leap into the unknown?
Dewey argues observation and recollection only determine what is given and assured; they define and locate the question but cannot answer it. Suggestions, inferences, and ideas run beyond what is given, forecasting possible results and things to do. Inference is thus always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known, and thought in this sense is creative—an incursion into the novel.
Chapter 47
What is Dewey's educational conclusion about conveying ideas from teacher to learner?
Dewey argues no thought or idea can be conveyed as an idea from one person to another; when told, it becomes another given fact to the listener. Only by wrestling with the problem firsthand does one think. The teacher's role is to provide conditions that stimulate thinking and participate in shared activity, not to furnish ready-made ideas or stand off passively.
Chapter 47

Section 484 cards

What does Dewey say application of ideas should primarily have?
Dewey argues that while application exercises can genuinely fix what is learned and build practical skill, practice in applying study ought primarily to have an intellectual quality. Thoughts are tentative suggestions and standpoints for dealing with situations of experience; only application tests them and confers full meaning and a sense of reality. Without use, ideas tend to segregate into a world of their own.
Chapter 48
What twofold bad effects does Dewey attribute to inert school learning?
Dewey says students need not think subject matter unreal, but it lacks the reality of vital experience; they grow used to treating it as real only for recitations, lessons, and examinations. The bad effects are twofold: ordinary experience is not enriched or fertilized by school learning, and attitudes from accepting half-understood, ill-digested material weaken vigor and efficiency of thought.
Chapter 48
How does Dewey respond to 'cultural' education's dismissal of manual activities?
Dewey argues that assuming manual and constructive activities are merely physical or professional is itself a product of philosophies that isolate mind from experience and action. If mind is a self-contained realm, bodily activity becomes a mere external annex with no place in liberal education. But mind is really the purposive, directive factor in developing experience, so this conclusion disappears.
Chapter 48
What are the three kinds of classroom instruction Dewey describes?
Dewey ranks them: least desirable treats each lesson as an independent whole, leaving the student no responsibility for finding contacts with other lessons or subjects. Wiser teachers lead students to use earlier lessons to understand the present and the present to illuminate the past, though school subject matter stays isolated. The best teaching builds a habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings with everyday life.
Chapter 48

Section 494 cards

According to Dewey, what is the relationship between method and subject matter?
The author argues method is never something outside the material; it is the effective direction of subject matter to desired results. Organized science shows material already subjected to intelligence and methodized. Method is antithetical not to subject matter but to random, ill-considered action, meaning action that is ill-adapted.
Chapter 49
How does Dewey use piano playing to illustrate method?
The author argues piano playing is not hitting keys at random but an orderly way of using them, and the order does not exist ready-made in the hands or brain before the activity. Order lies in the disposition of acts using piano, hands, and brain to achieve the intended result. Unlike a piano built for one end, study material has indefinite uses.
Chapter 49
When does the distinction between subject matter and method arise?
The author argues the distinction arises when we reflect upon an experience rather than simply having it. While eating, one does not divide the act into eating and food; scientific investigation of the act discriminates the nutritive material from the organism's acts of appropriating and digesting. Reflection gives rise to the experienced and the experiencing—subject matter and method.
Chapter 49
What does Dewey identify as the root of the dualism of method and subject matter?
The author argues the root is regarding a distinction in thought as a separation in existence, dividing self from environment or world. We then assume knowing, feeling, and willing belong to the mind in isolation and have their own laws furnishing method. Dewey says experience is a single continuous interaction of diverse energies, not a combination of mind and world.
Chapter 49

Section 504 cards

What four evils does Dewey say flow from isolating method from subject matter?
Dewey lists four: neglect of concrete experience situations, false conceptions of discipline and interest, learning made a conscious end in itself, and method reduced to cut-and-dried routine. Each follows from treating method as ready-made apart from material, so teachers get authoritative recipes instead of deriving method from observing actual experience.
Chapter 50
According to Dewey, how does normal learning differ from making learning a conscious end?
Dewey argues children do not consciously set out to learn walking or talking; they pursue impulses for communication and fuller intercourse, and learning follows as product and reward. Better teaching engages activities rather than fixing attention on having to learn. He adds this does not mean seducing students unaware, but occupying them for real ends, not just something to be learned.
Chapter 50
How does Dewey distinguish general method from a prescribed rule?
Dewey says general method is a cumulative body of stable methods authorized by past experience and analysis, which the individual ignores at his peril. A prescribed rule is a direct guide to action; general method operates indirectly through enlightenment about ends and means, working through intelligence rather than conformity to externally imposed orders. General methods reinforce individual initiative rather than oppose it.
Chapter 50
What does Dewey say about the artist's method and its relevance to teaching?
Dewey argues teaching is the method of an art, action intelligently directed by ends, and not extemporized inspiration. Artists study past successes, know materials and tools, and examine their own attempts to see what succeeds and fails. He rejects the assumption that the only alternatives are ready-made rules or trusting native gifts and undirected hard work.
Chapter 50

Section 514 cards

How does Dewey say established methods should function for a physician or teacher?
Dewey argues that recognized procedures are not ready-made models to copy but intellectual aids: they suggest what to look into, economize a survey of the particular case, and direct one's own response. The physician's and teacher's individual methods are facilitated, not subordinated, by general principles. When such knowledge gets in the way of common sense or comes between a person and the situation, it is worse than useless.
Chapter 51
What does Dewey call the belief in a uniform 'mind at large'?
Dewey calls the notion of mind in general, of one intellectual method the same for all, a fiction. Individuals are wrongly treated as differing only in quantity of mind, so ordinary people are expected to be ordinary and only the exceptional original. He argues mind, individual method, and originality are convertible terms meaning the quality of purposive action, and that imposing uniform method breeds mediocrity while measuring originality by deviation breeds eccentricity.
Chapter 51
What four attitudes does Dewey name as central to effective intellectual method?
Dewey names directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or whole-heartedness), and responsibility. He explains directness mainly through negatives: self-consciousness, embarrassment, and constraint are its foes because they divert concern from the subject matter to side issues. Confidence, meaning straightforwardness in going at the task and unconscious faith in the situation's possibilities, is a good name for directness, but it should not be confused with self-confidence or 'cheek.'
Chapter 51
According to Dewey, what happens when teachers make pupils aware they are studying?
Dewey argues that just to the degree pupils are induced to be aware they are studying or learning, they are not studying and learning; they are in a divided, complicated attitude. Methods that call attention off what the pupil has to do and onto his own attitude impair directness. Persisted in, this gives a permanent tendency to fumble, gaze aimlessly, and depend on extraneous suggestions instead of the subject matter.
Chapter 51

Section 524 cards

What does Dewey say open-mindedness is not the same as?
Dewey insists open-mindedness is not empty-mindedness. Hanging a sign reading "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not hospitality. Yet he adds that a kind of passivity—letting experiences accumulate, sink in, and ripen—is essential to development. External answers may be hurried, but processes may not be forced; they take their own time to mature.
Chapter 52
According to Dewey, what are the chief foes of open-mindedness in schools?
Dewey identifies exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results as the chief foes the open-minded attitude meets in school. Teachers who forbid diversity of operation impose intellectual blinders, restricting pupils' vision to the one path the teacher approves. He argues the zeal for "answers" explains much zeal for rigid, mechanical methods, since rigidity seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable results.
Chapter 52
How does Dewey define single-mindedness?
Dewey defines single-mindedness as completeness of interest and unity of purpose—the absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the professed aim is merely a mask. It is equivalent to mental integrity. Absorption, engrossment, and full concern with subject matter for its own sake nurture it, while divided interest and evasion destroy it.
Chapter 52
What school conditions does Dewey say produce divided attention or double-mindedness?
Dewey says "stern discipline"—external coercive pressure—has this tendency, as do rewards extraneous to the task and schooling made merely preparatory, with ends beyond the pupil's present grasp. He also cites exaggerated drill exercises producing automatic skill independent of thought. Suppressed desires are not abolished; they follow their own chaotic, undisciplined course, fostering habitual self-deception and a double standard of reality.
Chapter 52

Section 532 cards

How does Dewey distinguish intellectual thoroughness from physical thoroughness?
Dewey says there is a thoroughness that is almost purely physical: mechanical, exhausting drill on all details of a subject. Intellectual thoroughness, by contrast, is seeing a thing through. It depends on a unity of purpose to which details are subordinated, not on a multitude of disconnected details, and shows in developing the full meaning of a purpose rather than in conscientious attention to externally imposed steps.
Chapter 53
What does Dewey say are the worst results of overcrowded school subjects?
Dewey argues the most permanent bad results of undue complication of subjects and congestion of studies are not the worry, nervous strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow, serious as these are. The worst result is failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and believing a thing. He says it would be better to have fewer facts if more situations were worked out to real conviction.
Chapter 53

Section 544 cards

From the teacher's standpoint, what do organized school studies provide?
The author argues that organized subject matter gives the instructor definite standards and reveals the possibilities of pupils' crude activities. It translates the meanings of current social life into concrete terms, puts the essential ingredients of culture before the teacher in organized form, and protects him from haphazard efforts he would otherwise make. It is not perfection or infallible wisdom, but the best available means to further new experiences.
Chapter 54
How does the subject matter of the learner differ from that of the adult?
The author argues the difference is real, not seeming: the learner's subject matter cannot be identical with the formulated, crystallized, systematized material found in books and works of art. The latter represents the possibilities of the former, not its existing state. It enters directly into the activities of the expert and educator, not the beginner. Failure to bear this difference in mind causes most mistakes in using texts.
Chapter 54
What three stages mark the growth of subject matter in the learner?
The author identifies three fairly typical stages: first, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent ability—power to do, expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things; second, this material is deepened through communicated knowledge or information; third, it is enlarged and worked over into rationally or logically organized material, that of one who is relatively an expert in the subject.
Chapter 54
Why does the author say simple scholarship is not enough for teaching?
The author argues the teacher's knowledge extends far beyond the pupil's acquaintance and involves principles beyond the immature pupil's understanding and interest. Also, achieved scholarship is organized by logical relations among facts, while the young organize experience around direct practical centers of interest, such as home and movements. The teacher must attend to subject matter's interaction with pupils' present needs and capacities, not subject matter itself.
Chapter 54

Section 553 cards

According to Dewey, what criterion estimates the value of informational material in school?
Dewey argues information is educative if it grows naturally out of a question the student is concerned with and fits into his direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy and deepen its meaning. The amount heard or read is unimportant—the more the better—provided the student needs it and can apply it in a situation of his own.
Chapter 55
What does Dewey say happens when communicated material cannot be organized into the learner's existing experience?
Dewey argues it becomes mere words: pure sense-stimuli lacking meaning. It then calls out mechanical reactions—ability to use the vocal organs to repeat statements, or the hand to write or do sums. He notes it is no objection that information is clothed in words, since communication necessarily occurs through words.
Chapter 55
Why does Dewey claim ignorance is less a foe to learning than opinionated current error?
Dewey argues the undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and prone to assertion, treating things as settled without due warrant; familiarity, common repute, and congeniality to desire become measuring rods of truth. Thus ignorance gives way to opinionated error, a greater foe to learning. He cites Socrates on consciousness of ignorance and Descartes on science born of doubting.
Chapter 55

Section 564 cards

Why does Dewey say science holds a unique place in education?
Dewey argues science is the safeguard against natural tendencies to accept ideas prematurely and blame failure on bad luck. It consists of acquired, learned methods and appliances for conducting reflection so procedures and results are tested. Without initiation into the scientific spirit, one lacks the best tools for directed reflection and fails to understand knowledge's full meaning, not distinguishing opinion from authorized conviction.
Chapter 56
How does Dewey reconcile science as method with science as organized knowledge?
Dewey says the opposition is only seeming. What marks off science is not organization but the kind effected by adequate methods of tested discovery. A farmer's knowledge is practically organized around means to ends; scientific subject matter is organized with reference to knowing as a specialized undertaking. So the more one emphasizes organization as science's mark, the more one is committed to the primacy of method.
Chapter 56
What criterion does Dewey say should guide curriculum selection?
Dewey argues education, especially short of the most specialized phases, should use a criterion of social worth. The curriculum must adapt studies to existing community life and select to improve shared life so the future is better. Essentials are what concern the widest groups; specialized and technical pursuits are secondary. He holds that education must first be human, then professional.
Chapter 56
What does Dewey mean by calling science 'abstract,' and what danger follows?
Dewey says science perfects knowing under highly specialized technical conditions, making its results remote from ordinary experience—an aloofness popularly called abstract. When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific information is even more exposed to the dangers of ready-made subject matter than other information. So the same specialization that gives science its value also threatens its right use in education.
Chapter 56

Section 574 cards

According to Dewey, what is the primary subject matter of education?
The subject matter of education consists primarily of the meanings which supply content to existing social life. Many of these meanings come from past collective experience, and as social life grows more complex they increase in number and import. Dewey argues there is need for special selection, formulation, and organization so they may be adequately transmitted to the new generation.
Chapter 57
What grounds does Dewey give for placing play and active work in the curriculum?
Dewey argues the grounds are intellectual and social, not temporary expediency or momentary agreeableness. Play and work engage the whole pupil, reduce the gap between in-school and out-of-school life, provide motives for attention to educative materials, and supply cooperative associations. Without them, knowledge-getting cannot grow out of activities having their own end rather than being a school task.
Chapter 57
Why does Dewey say out-of-school play and work are insufficient for education?
Dewey notes that in most out-of-school conditions an educational result is a by-product: it is incidental, not primary, so growth secured is more or less accidental. Much work shares the defects of existing industrial society, and play tends to reproduce both the crudities and excellencies of surrounding adult life. The school must set up an environment where play and work facilitate desirable mental and moral growth.
Chapter 57
What practices does Dewey's principle rule out in manual and kindergarten activities?
Dewey says activities following definite prescription and dictation, or reproducing ready-made models without modification, may give muscular dexterity but do not require perceiving and elaborating ends or using judgment in selecting and adapting means. He notes manual training and many traditional kindergarten exercises erred here. He also argues opportunity for making mistakes is an incidental requirement, since overzeal to prevent mistakes restricts initiative.
Chapter 57

Section 584 cards

Why does Dewey reject starting students with pre-perfected materials?
The author argues that beginning with material already shaped by mind is fallacious: a pupil will not absorb the intelligence that went into its shaping. Only by starting with crude material and subjecting it to purposeful handling does the pupil gain the intelligence embodied in finished material. Overemphasis on formed material also exaggerates mathematical qualities like size, form, and proportion, yielding only technical knowledge.
Chapter 58
What does Dewey mean by a 'whole' in education?
The author argues that wholes for education are not physical affairs. Intellectually, a whole depends on a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of appeal a situation makes. Exaggerated devotion to efficient skill irrespective of present purpose produces isolated exercises—accurate measurements, tool drills, object lessons—where technique is acquired apart from the purposes of discovery that alone give it meaning.
Chapter 58
Why does Dewey criticize object lessons and teaching properties before use?
The author argues the error is assuming that before objects can be intelligently used, their properties must be known. In fact the senses are normally used in purposeful use of things, since perceived qualities are factors reckoned with in accomplishment. A boy making a kite attends to wood grain, size, and angles differently than a pupil given an object lesson where wood's sole function is lesson material.
Chapter 58
What educational significance does Dewey give to active occupations like gardening?
The author argues occupations represent things to do, not studies, and may typify social situations centered on food, shelter, clothing, and production. Freed from pecuniary gain and wage-earning pressure, they supply intrinsically valuable, liberalizing experience. Gardening can approach farming's history and social place, teach growth, soil chemistry, light, air, moisture, and animal life, and lead mature students to deliberate intellectual investigation.
Chapter 58

Section 594 cards

According to Dewey, from what did the sciences historically grow?
The author argues that sciences grew gradually out of useful social occupations. Physics developed from the use of tools and machines, as the name mechanics suggests; chemistry grew from dyeing, bleaching, and metal working; geometry literally means earth-measuring. Dewey says these origins are not arguments for recapitulating racial history, but they show that active occupations can serve as opportunities for scientific study.
Chapter 59
What did Dewey identify as the historical obstacle to scientific progress?
The author argues that scientific progress was slow in ages when learned men held contempt for the materials and processes of everyday life, especially manual pursuits. They tried to derive knowledge from general principles by logical reasoning alone. Dewey says the rise of experimental methods in the seventeenth century proved that controlled action on physical things is more typical of the right way of knowing than isolated logical reasoning.
Chapter 59
How does Dewey distinguish play from work?
Dewey argues play and industry are not sharply antithetical; both involve consciously entertained ends and the selection and adaptation of materials to achieve them. The difference is largely one of time-span affecting the directness of means and ends. In play the interest is more direct and the anticipated result is another activity, so play is free and plastic; work requires holding to a definite external outcome with persistence.
Chapter 59
What happens to play as children mature, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues there are no exclusive periods of play and work, only differences of emphasis. Young children want tangible results and eagerly help with adult tasks. As maturity increases, activity yielding no tangible achievement loses interest; play then changes to fooling, which if habitually indulged is demoralizing. Observable results are necessary for persons to sense and measure their own powers.
Chapter 59

Section 603 cards

According to Dewey, what distinguishes play from work psychologically?
Dewey argues play and work are both free, intrinsically motivated activity; the difference is that play's aim is more activity in the same line, while work consciously includes regard for consequences as part of itself. Work becomes constrained labor only when consequences lie outside the activity, making it a mere means. Work permeated with the play attitude is art in quality.
Chapter 60
What educational importance does Dewey assign to occupations in play and work?
Dewey argues such occupations are the most direct instrumentalities for extending meaning, since an action's meaning depends on the context of connections in which it is placed. Set going under adequate conditions, they act as magnets gathering and retaining wide intellectual considerations, providing vital centers for receiving and assimilating information rather than letting it stratify as inert chunks.
Chapter 60
What does Dewey say distinguishes human activity from tool-making or animal training?
Dewey argues that physically, human activity is a mere scratch on the globe, yet in meaning it measures civilization's difference from savagery. What makes human education different from manufacturing a tool or training an animal is the advantage in appropriating and finding meanings; the latter increase efficiency but do not develop significance. There is no limit to meaning an action may possess.
Chapter 60

Section 614 cards

According to Dewey, what do geography and history supply to ordinary actions?
The author argues that geography and history supply subject matter giving background, outlook, and intellectual perspective to what might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere technical skills. As our doings are placed in their time and space connections, they gain significant content, and ordinary daily experiences cease to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance.
Chapter 61
What happens when geography and history are taught as ready-made studies?
Dewey warns that teaching them as ready-made studies, studied only because one is sent to school, produces many statements about remote things alien to everyday experience. Activity is divided into two separate worlds, no transmutation occurs, and ordinary experience is not enlarged. It loses mobility and responsiveness, weighed down by unassimilated information; mere amassing of information makes mind wooden.
Chapter 61
How does Dewey describe curiosity and the educator's role?
The author argues curiosity is not an accidental isolated possession but a necessary consequence of experience being a moving, changing thing involving connections with other things—the tendency to make those conditions perceptible. It is the educator's business to supply an environment so that this reaching out of experience is fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active.
Chapter 61
What is the stated function of history and geography, and what happens if their interdependence is ignored?
Dewey states their function is to enrich and liberate direct personal contacts by furnishing context, background, and outlook. Geography emphasizes the physical side, history the social, but both concern associated life of men, which takes place on earth; nature is the medium of social occurrences. If this interdependence is ignored, history sinks to listed dates with an inventory of events, or becomes literary phantasy.
Chapter 61

Section 624 cards

According to Dewey, what makes geography educative rather than a rag-bag of facts?
Dewey argues geography is educative when natural facts are connected with social events and consequences—the earth as the home of man. Holding these ties together requires an informed, cultivated imagination. When the ties are broken, geography becomes a miscellany of unrelated fragments, scattering and imaginatively inert, rather than humanizing and unified.
Chapter 62
How does Dewey say local or home geography should function in instruction?
Dewey argues home geography is a natural starting point for moving out into the unknown, not an end in itself. Treated as a basis for reaching the larger world, familiar things like fences, sunlight, and streams gain meaning. Treated as if meaning ends in local confines, the study becomes as deadly as object lessons that merely catalog familiar properties.
Chapter 62
What is the educational center of gravity for coordinating the branches of geography?
Dewey argues the center of gravity lies in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject. From this center, material is relevant insofar as it helps appreciate the significance of human activities and relations. Specialized branches—mathematical, physiographic, political, commercial—are for specialists; their interaction concerns man as a social being, not an external compromise that crowds in each.
Chapter 62
Why does Dewey say history should not be divorced from present social life?
Dewey argues knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present; history deals with the past, but this past is the history of the present. The true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems. Studying the present in process of formation makes complex things comprehensible, and past events cannot be separated from the living present and retain meaning.
Chapter 62

Section 634 cards

How does Dewey say the biographical method should and should not be used?
The author argues the biographical method is psychologically sound because great leaders make abstract historic episodes concrete and vivid. But it is misused when it exaggerates the doings of a few individuals without reference to the social situations they represent. A biography isolating a man from the conditions that aroused him is not a study of history, since social life is an affair of individuals in association; it becomes only a sugar coating for fragments of information.
Chapter 63
What value does Dewey see in studying primitive life as an introduction to history?
Dewey holds that primitive life can present the fundamental elements of present conditions in immensely simplified form, like unraveling a cloth whose pattern is too close to the eyes to see. Since we cannot simplify present situations by deliberate experiment, primitive life offers the sort of results an experiment would give, reducing social relationships to their lowest terms. When this social aim is overlooked, however, the study becomes merely a rehearsing of sensational features of savagery.
Chapter 63
Why does Dewey rank economic or industrial history above political history?
The author argues economic history is more human, democratic, and liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise and fall of principalities and powers but with the growth of effective liberties of the common man, for whom powers exist. It shows the successive inventions applying science to control of nature, revealing causes of social progress, and it concerns the occupations and values of getting a living that fundamentally concern all men in common.
Chapter 63
What does Dewey claim is the neglected branch of history, and what moral value does history have?
Dewey says intellectual history is perhaps the most neglected branch in general education, and that the great heroes advancing human destiny are scientific discoverers, inventors, artists, and poets rather than politicians, generals, and diplomatists. History's moral significance, the author argues, is cultivating a socialized intelligence: an organ for analyzing the present social fabric. Using it as a reservoir of anecdotes for special moral lessons yields at best a temporary emotional glow, at worst callous indifference to moralizing.
Chapter 63

Section 644 cards

According to Dewey, what is the readiest way to enrich a direct personal experience?
Dewey argues that normal communication with others is the readiest way to develop an experience's significance, since it links the net results of the group's and even the race's experience to the individual's immediate experience. By normal communication he means joint interest—one eager to give, the other to take—contrasted with merely telling things to test literal reproduction.
Chapter 64
What two school subjects does Dewey call the great resources for enlarging personal experience?
Dewey identifies geography and history as the two great school resources for enlarging the significance of direct personal experience. Active occupations reach out in space and time regarding nature and man; unless taught for external reasons or as mere skills, their chief value is providing roads into the larger world of meanings. History makes human implications explicit, geography natural connections, and the two are phases of one living whole.
Chapter 64
How does Dewey define science and its place in knowing?
Dewey defines science as knowledge resulting from deliberately adopted methods of observation, reflection, and testing aimed at a settled, assured subject matter. It involves persistent effort to revise current beliefs, weed out error, add accuracy, and shape facts so their mutual dependencies are obvious. Science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage, and signifies realization of the logical implications of any knowledge.
Chapter 64
Why does Dewey criticize starting science instruction with simplified perfected form?
Dewey argues that to the learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting point. Starting with simplified rudiments isolates science from significant experience: pupils learn symbols without keys to meaning, acquire technical information without connections to familiar objects, and often just a peculiar vocabulary. The chronological 'psychological' method, beginning with learner experience, yields superior understanding and vital interest despite apparent loss of time.
Chapter 64

Section 654 cards

Why do laboratory exercises alone fail to constitute scientific method?
Dewey argues that while laboratory work is indispensable to scientific method, it does not automatically constitute it. Materials may be manipulated with apparatus yet remain disassociated from out-of-school materials and processes. Problems dealt with may be only problems of science—those occurring to one already initiated. Attention may go to technical skill without reference to a problem in subject matter. There is sometimes, he says, a ritual of laboratory instruction.
Chapter 65
How does scientific terminology differ from ordinary vernacular language?
In the vernacular, the mind proceeds directly from symbol to thing signified; association with familiar material is so close the mind does not pause on the sign. Scientific terminology instead stands for things placed in a cognitive system, not things directly in practical use. Immediately it designates things translated into terms of scientific inquiry; atoms, molecules, formulae and mathematical propositions have primarily intellectual value and only indirectly empirical value, serving as instruments for carrying on science.
Chapter 65
What does Dewey say is the chief role of science in experience?
Dewey argues science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends; it is the agency of progress in action. He distinguishes minor progress—improving means toward ends already sought—from more important progress: enriching prior purposes and forming new ones. New desires and demands for new qualities of satisfaction arise as intelligence perceives new possibilities of action.
Chapter 65
What responsibility does Dewey place on education regarding science?
Dewey admits that much progress from science has been only technical—providing more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires rather than modifying the quality of human purposes. He notes no modern civilization equals Greek culture in all respects, and science is still too recent to be absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Education must therefore use science to modify habitual attitudes of imagination and feeling, not leave it merely an extension of physical arms and legs.
Chapter 65

Section 664 cards

In Dewey's account, what does experimental science let past experience become?
The author argues experimental science makes past experience the servant, not the master, of mind. Reason then operates within experience rather than beyond it, giving experience an intelligent quality. Science is experience becoming rational, and it changes both the idea of experience's possibilities and the operation of reason, which becomes the factor purifying past experiences into tools for discovery and advance.
Chapter 66
How does Dewey distinguish the popular sense of 'abstract' from its role in reflection?
Popular speech treats 'abstract' as abstruse and far from life, but the author argues abstraction is indispensable to reflective direction of activity. Since situations do not literally repeat, habit fails when novelty matters; abstraction deliberately selects from former experience what helps with the new, consciously transferring a meaning from past to present. Dewey calls it the very artery of intelligence.
Chapter 66
What does Dewey say generalization is, and why is it a social device?
Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction: an abstraction functioning when applied to new concrete experience, extended to clarify and direct new situations. The author argues it is essentially social, since narrow group interests produced correspondingly restricted generalizations. Scientific abstraction and generalization amount to taking the point of view of any person, whatever their location in time and space, enabling wide free application.
Chapter 66
Why does Dewey claim formulation is essential to completing thought?
The author argues a meaning detached from experience must acquire a local habitation; names give abstract meanings a locus and body, so formulation is essential to completing thought, not an after-thought. Much knowledge stays practical and personal, as with artists and executives, but it is untransferable. To formulate significance, one must account for others' experiences and find a standpoint including them.
Chapter 66

Section 671 cards

Why does Dewey reject opposing science to literature in the curriculum?
The author argues the assumption that language and literature are exclusively humanistic while science is purely physical is false and cripples both studies. Human life is bound up with nature's processes, so for education natural science is knowledge of the conditions of human action—thoroughly humanistic in quality.
Chapter 67

Section 684 cards

What does Dewey say distinguishes direct experience from mediated experience?
Dewey contrasts immediate, first-hand experience—where we take part vitally—with mediated experience, which comes through signs and symbols standing for absent things. Language and all symbols are implements of indirect experience. Since direct personal experience is very limited, representative media enlarge its range and give it deeper meaning, but they always risk becoming ends in themselves.
Chapter 68
What danger does formal education face regarding symbols, according to Dewey?
The author argues that symbols may fail to be truly representative, becoming ends in themselves rather than calling up the remote within present experience. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, so that when literacy arrives, mere bookishness—what is popularly called the academic—too often comes with it.
Chapter 68
What is the first basic function of laboratory work in a new field?
Dewey states that the first and basic function of laboratory work in high school or college, in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a range of facts and problems—to give a 'feeling' for them. Getting command of technique and methods of testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation.
Chapter 68
How do working standards of value differ from professed standards?
Dewey argues that real, working standards depend on what an individual has himself appreciated as deeply significant in concrete situations, not on conventional rules taught directly. A person may profess classical musical standards yet, if ragtime is what he has most enjoyed, his active norm is fixed at the ragtime level. This split produces unconscious hypocrisy and instability of disposition.
Chapter 68

Section 693 cards

What does Dewey say appreciation is, beyond literature and art?
The author argues it is a serious mistake to confine appreciation to literature, pictures, and music; its scope is as comprehensive as education itself. Habit formation is purely mechanical unless habits are also tastes—habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. Dewey grounds the frequent school reliance on external discipline, marks, rewards, and promotion on neglect of life situations that bring home the meaning of facts and ideas.
Chapter 69
What role do literature and fine arts play in education for Dewey?
The author argues there is no sharp initial demarcation between useful and fine arts; activities contain factors later discriminated into both. In one meaning, appreciation is opposed to depreciation, denoting enlarged, intensified prizing. Literature, music, drawing, and painting are not the exclusive but the chief agencies of intensified appreciation: they fix taste, form standards, arouse discontent with inferior conditions, supply organs of vision, and are not luxuries but emphatic expressions of what makes education worth while.
Chapter 69
What distinction does Dewey draw between intrinsic and instrumental values?
Dewey says to value means primarily to prize or esteem, and secondarily to apprise or estimate—cherishing something and judging its value compared with something else. This coincides with the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values. Intrinsic values are not objects of judgment and cannot be compared as greater or less; they are invaluable. But occasions arise when we must choose and let one thing go for another, establishing an order of preference; things then judged are estimated in relation to a further end, making them means or instrumental values.
Chapter 69

Section 704 cards

According to Dewey, when does comparison and valuation of goods arise?
Dewey argues that each enjoyed experience—conversation, music, food, reading, earning money—is an intrinsic good in its own place, incomparable and serving its own end. Comparison and valuation arise only when goods compete or conflict and a choice must be made; then a good is treated as a means, and its claims are weighed against alternatives in that specific situation.
Chapter 70
What does Dewey conclude about establishing a hierarchy of educational values among studies?
Dewey argues it is futile to arrange studies in an order from least to maximum worth. Insofar as a study has a unique or irreplaceable function in experience, its worth is intrinsic and incomparable. Since education is identical with living a fruitful life rather than a means to living, the only ultimate value is the process of living itself, of which studies are ingredients, not subordinate means.
Chapter 70
How should a student come to apprehend the instrumental value of arithmetic?
Dewey argues the way is not to lecture students about benefits in some remote, uncertain future, but to let them discover that success in something they are interested in doing depends on the ability to use number. He adds that every study, arithmetic as much as poetry, ought at some time to be appreciated on its own account, or its later use as an instrument is handicapped.
Chapter 70
What does Dewey say about assigning a single fixed value to science or poetry?
Dewey argues that distributing distinct sorts of value among studies is misguided. Science may be military, technological, commercial, philanthropic, or conventional depending on the situation; fixing one as its 'real' end is arbitrary. Poetry has served religion, morals, history, and patriotism—Homer was Bible, textbook, and national inspiration to the Greeks. Educationally, each should first have appreciation value as an end in itself.
Chapter 70

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According to Dewey, what is absurd about demanding future utility from every topic?
The author argues it is absurd to require that teacher or pupil point out a definite future use for a study before it has justifying value. When pupils are genuinely concerned in learning something, like Latin, that response is itself proof of value. The question about instrumental value can only be asked of instrumental goods, and it presupposes something intrinsically good, good for itself.
Chapter 71
When does Dewey say conscious reference to results is needed in learning?
Dewey says conscious reference to consequences is indicated when a child is ill and appetite fails, or when appetite is perverted toward candy over meat and vegetables. It is also needed when an individual does not grasp how attaining some intrinsic good depends on active concern with what is presented. In general, a topic should either have immediate value or be perceived as a means to something intrinsically valuable.
Chapter 71
How does Dewey characterize values like health, wealth, efficiency, and culture?
Dewey argues these are not ultimate ends to which concrete satisfactions are subordinate. They are only abstract terms summing up a multitude of particulars, more or less adequate generalizations of concrete goods. They are not true standards of valuation, since standards are found in specific realizations forming tastes and habits of preference. They are significant only as points of view for surveying and proportioning the details of life.
Chapter 71
What five criteria does Dewey offer for surveying the school curriculum?
Dewey suggests the kind of experience schools should contribute to is marked by executive competency in managing resources and obstacles (efficiency); sociability, or interest in direct companionship; aesthetic taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in classic forms; trained intellectual method, or interest in scientific achievement; and sensitiveness to the rights and claims of others (conscientiousness). He stresses these are useful criteria for survey and criticism, not standards of value.
Chapter 71

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What does Dewey claim schemes assigning values to studies actually justify?
The author argues that schemes of values of studies are largely unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one is already familiar. One accepts the existing course and then assigns values to it as a sufficient reason for teaching it. The values belong to subjects only if and when they accomplish those results, not inherently.
Chapter 72
How does Dewey illustrate his 'check and balance' view of experience?
The author compares it to the check and balance theory of government powers, where independent functions limit one another. Applied to experience, diverse interests like politics, business, art, and science are each assigned a special territory, and the ideal is that each stays within its boundaries. An ideal education would then meet these separate, pigeon-holed interests.
Chapter 72
What bad results follow from treating studies as separate interests, and what remedy is usually tried?
The outcome is congestion of the course of study, overpressure and distraction of pupils, and narrow specialization fatal to education. The author argues these bad results usually lead to more of the same: adding still another study or another kind of school, or else cutting studies as fads and frills and returning to the three R's and classics.
Chapter 72
What does Dewey say the educational question of values ultimately concerns?
The author argues the point at issue in a theory of educational value is the unity or integrity of experience: how it can be full and varied without losing unity of spirit. Ultimately the question of values is the moral question of organizing the interests of life; educationally it concerns organizing schools, materials, and methods to achieve breadth and richness of experience.
Chapter 72

Section 734 cards

What two meanings does Dewey give to the term "value"?
Dewey distinguishes valuing as prizing a thing for its own sake, an attitude of appreciation naming a full or complete experience, from valuing as a distinctively intellectual act of comparing and judging, which he calls valuate. The latter occurs when direct full experience is lacking and one must decide which possibility of a situation is preferable to reach a vital experience.
Chapter 73
How does Dewey say curriculum studies should not be divided, and why?
Dewey rejects splitting studies into appreciative ones holding intrinsic value and instrumental ones valued for ends beyond themselves. Proper standards in any subject depend on realizing its contribution to the immediate significance of experience, a direct appreciation. Literature and fine arts show appreciation at its best, but every subject at some phase should possess an aesthetic quality for the individual.
Chapter 73
What criterion does Dewey give for judging instrumental studies, and what causes segregated values?
Dewey argues that contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety in experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of instrumental and derived values in studies. The tendency to assign separate values to each study and treat the curriculum as a composite of segregated values results from the isolation of social groups and classes, so democratic education must struggle against that isolation.
Chapter 73
According to Dewey, what is the origin of the opposition between liberal and industrial education?
Dewey traces the separation of liberal from professional and industrial education to the Greeks, formulated on a division of classes into those who labored for a living and those relieved from that necessity. Liberal education was deemed intrinsically higher because one class was free and the other servile. Dewey concludes that rigidly identifying work with material interests and leisure with ideal interests is itself a social product.
Chapter 73

Section 744 cards

For Aristotle, what distinguishes truly liberal education from servile training?
The author explains that Aristotle separates base or mechanical education, which trains technical skill through habituation and repetition, from liberal education, which trains intelligence to know. The less knowledge relates to practical affairs or producing, the more it engages intelligence. Only education aimed at the power to know as an end in itself, without reference even to civic duties, is truly liberal or free.
Chapter 74
Why does Aristotle rank the fine arts with menial arts in practice?
The author notes that Aristotle places music, painting, and sculpture in the same class as menial arts insofar as they are practiced, because they involve physical agencies, assiduous practice, and external results. Music practice is tolerated only as aiding appreciation of music played by slaves or professionals; aiming at professional power lowers music to the professional level, and one might as well teach cooking.
Chapter 74
Within the life of reason, how does Aristotle distinguish the citizen from the thinker?
The author states that the free citizen devoted to public life lives a life merely accompanied by reason, while the thinker devoted to scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation works in reason. Civic activity retains a taint of practice and external doing, shown by its need for others. A purely intellectual life is carried on by oneself, so knowing for its own sake is alone independent and self-sufficing.
Chapter 74
Why does the author say Aristotle's view remains relevant despite social change?
The author argues that Aristotle simply described the life before him, and though legal serfdom is abolished and democracy, science, and general education have spread, a cleavage persists between a learned and an unlearned class, a leisure and a laboring class. This makes his viewpoint enlightening for criticizing the separation between culture and utility in present education, behind which looms a social distinction.
Chapter 74

Section 754 cards

What did Aristotle say makes an occupation or art 'mechanical'?
Aristotle held that any occupation, art, or study deserves to be called mechanical if it renders the body, soul, or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and practice of excellence. Dewey calls this permanently right, but argues its force is vastly increased when all persons, not just a few, are regarded as free.
Chapter 75
Where does Dewey locate the error in Aristotle's view of skill and thought?
Dewey says Aristotle was right to rank understanding and free play of ideas above mere skill and external products. The error lay in assuming a necessary separation: supposing a natural divorce between efficiency in producing commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought; between significant knowledge and practical achievement. Dewey notes correcting the theory alone is insufficient.
Chapter 75
What does Dewey say about the current 'cultural' versus 'utilitarian' curriculum?
Dewey argues the idea persists that truly liberal education cannot relate to industrial affairs, and that education for the masses must be merely practical. The result is an inconsistent mixture: cultural subjects not socially serviceable, utilitarian subjects not liberative of imagination or thinking power—an inorganic composite rather than a unified system.
Chapter 75
How does Dewey illustrate the compromise between utility and leisure in early studies?
Dewey notes the first four or five years are mostly reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic, justified by utility—getting ahead—yet taught through drill for automatic skill. He contrasts Greek schooling, where skill acquisition was subordinated to literary content with aesthetic and moral significance, and says isolating these studies from practical application survives the idea of liberal training divorced from utility.
Chapter 75

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According to Dewey, what makes a useful activity illiberal?
Dewey argues an activity is illiberal not because it is socially or economically useful, but because workers lack insight into its social aims and have no direct personal interest in the results, which belong to employers. They act for the wage, not freely and intelligently. Activity is illiberal because it is not freely participated in.
Chapter 76
Why did the Greeks regard livelihood activities as servile?
Dewey argues it was not the bare fact of social and economic utility that made activities seem servile to the Greeks, but that livelihood work was not an expression of trained intelligence nor carried on for personal appreciation of its meaning. Insofar as farming and trades were rule-of-thumb and aimed at results external to the workers' minds, they were illiberal — but only so far.
Chapter 76
What does Dewey say has changed about modern industry's intellectual context?
Dewey argues the intellectual and social context has changed: custom and routine have become subordinate in most economic callings to elements from scientific inquiry. Key occupations depend on applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and economic production's influence has widened so that geographical and political considerations enter in. Thus the liberal and practical value of subjects like geometry approach the same limit.
Chapter 76

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Why did Athenian philosophy treat reason as superior to experience?
The author explains that Athenian philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of knowledge and conduct. Seeking a replacement, it hit upon reason as the only adequate guide. Since custom and tradition were identified with experience, reason was placed above experience, and experience was portrayed as inherently unstable and inadequate.
Chapter 77
What did 'empirical' mean in this Greek context?
The chapter says empirical meant knowledge and ability not based on insight into principles but expressing the result of many separate trials—what is now called trial and error, with emphasis on the accidental character of the trials. It amounted to rule-of-thumb routine, working when new circumstances resembled the past and failing as they deviated.
Chapter 77
How does the chapter describe the empiric's slide toward the quack?
Because experience lacks science or reason, it is hard to keep at its poor best. The empiric easily degenerates into the quack: he does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, so beyond routine conditions he pretends, makes unjustified claims, trusts to luck, and bluffs. He also assumes that knowing one thing means knowing others, as Athenian craftsmen thought they could manage politics.
Chapter 77
Why did the philosophers link experience with the body and the material?
The author states the philosophers generalized that the senses connect with appetites, wants, and desires, grasping things only in relation to pleasures, pains, and bodily welfare. Experience thus took on a material character tied to physical things, while reason or science was held to grasp the immaterial, ideal, and spiritual. Words like sensual and worldly suggested moral danger; pure reason suggested moral praise.
Chapter 77

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How did Plato and the classic tradition rank experience versus reason?
Plato treated experience as habituation, the conserved product of past chance trials, while reason was the principle of reform, progress, and increased control. Devotion to reason meant breaking through custom to reach things as they really are. This estimate led to contempt for sense observation, the body, and arts and crafts, and to preference for ideal symbols over concrete particulars.
Chapter 78
How did modern reformers reverse the classic view of reason and experience?
The author explains that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reformers inverted the classic doctrine: reason, universal principles, and a priori notions became either blank forms needing sensory experience for validity, or dogmas imposed by authority. Appeal to experience marked a breach with authority, meaning openness to new impressions and discovery rather than systematizing received ideas.
Chapter 78
What twofold change did the modern theory make to the concept of experience?
First, experience lost its practical meaning of ways of doing and being done to, becoming a name for something intellectual and cognitive—a way of knowing. Second, interest in basing truth on objects led to viewing the mind as purely receptive, so empiricism became sensationalism identifying knowledge with reception and association of sensory impressions. The author argues this produced even greater intellectualism than ancient philosophy.
Chapter 78
What educational benefits did empiricism and sensationalism provide?
The author notes empiricism protested against mere book learning: if knowledge comes from impressions by natural objects, objects must be used, since words without prior object presentations convey only sensations of shape and color. Sensationalism also supplied a test against tradition and authority—where are the real objects?—and insisted on a first-hand element in knowledge.
Chapter 78

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Why does Dewey say sensationalistic empiricism failed as a constructive educational philosophy?
The author argues its historical value was critical—it dissolved dogmas—but education is constructive, building new experience into intellectual habits. Sensationalism is unfitted for this because mind means responsiveness to meanings, and meaning requires a context that identifying knowledge with combined sense-impressions excludes. Applied educationally, it led either to magnifying mere physical excitations or to heaping up isolated objects and qualities.
Chapter 79
How does the experimental method, on Dewey's view, change what sense perception contributes to knowledge?
The author argues modern scientific procedure is experimentation under deliberate control. Sense perceptions remain indispensable, but less reliance is placed on them in their natural form; the first step is to alter and extend them via telescope, microscope, and experimental devices. General conceptions, including mathematical ones, are no longer knowledge in themselves but implements for instituting, conducting, and interpreting experimental inquiries and formulating results.
Chapter 79

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How does Dewey redefine experience in relation to rational knowledge?
Dewey argues experience is no longer opposed to rational knowledge; it becomes deliberate control of what is done, aimed at making what happens fertile with suggestions and a means of testing their validity. When experimenting is guided by aim, measure, and method, it becomes reasonable. When what we undergo becomes a consequence of our own purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant, dissolving the empiricism-rationalism antithesis.
Chapter 80
Why is the practical versus intellectual distinction not intrinsic?
Dewey argues the distinction depends on regulable conditions, not on the nature of the studies. Practical activities become intellectually narrow when routine, dictated by authority, and aimed only at external results. But schooling is precisely the time to conduct them in a different spirit, so that intellectual studies represent an intellectualizing of practical pursuits rather than their opposite.
Chapter 80
What does experimental science demonstrate about genuine knowledge?
Dewey argues the progress of experimental science shows there is no genuine knowledge or fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing. The analysis and rearrangement of facts needed for knowledge and explanation cannot be done purely inside the head; people must alter conditions and do something to things. This is the lesson of the laboratory method, which all education must learn.
Chapter 80
Why did the Greeks oppose reason and experience?
Dewey explains the Greeks were led to philosophize by the increasing failure of traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Seeking a rational standard, and having identified experience with those unsatisfactory customs, they set reason flatly against experience. The more reason was exalted, the more experience and the doing it involved were depreciated, magnifying methods avoiding sense-observation and bodily activity.
Chapter 80

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How does the new conception of experience differ from the ancient one?
The author argues the new theory reinstates the ancient idea that experience is primarily practical—doing and undergoing consequences—rather than cognitive. But it transforms that theory by realizing doing can be directed to incorporate what thought suggests and to yield securely tested knowledge. Experience thus ceases to be empirical and becomes experimental, and reason becomes all the resources making activity fruitful in meaning.
Chapter 81
Why did literary and humanistic studies rise in the later ancient period?
Two factors conspired. First, culture became increasingly reminiscent and borrowed: Alexandrian and Roman civilization was inherited from alien sources, so it looked back to records rather than directly at nature and society. Second, Roman life had a political and rhetorical bent. Hatch notes Greece lost political power but possessed a literary heritage, so men stressed acquaintance with past literature and cultivated speech—a fashion inherited by later ages.
Chapter 81
What link spans the centuries between Greco-Roman and later European education?
The author argues barbarian Europe repeated the Roman situation on a larger scale: it went to school to Greco-Roman civilization and borrowed rather than evolved its culture, taking models of law and general ideas from alien records. Dependence on tradition was intensified by dominant theological interests, since Church authorities appealed to literatures in foreign tongues. All converged to identify learning with linguistic training and make the learned language literary rather than the mother speech.
Chapter 81

Section 824 cards

How does Dewey define Scholasticism in relation to teaching methods?
Dewey argues Scholasticism is essentially a systematization of teaching methods suited to transmitting an authoritative body of ready-made truths, rather than methods of inquiry, discovery, and invention. He claims schools that still teach from textbooks and rely on authority and acquisition rather than discovery use Scholastic methods, minus Scholasticism's logical accuracy and system.
Chapter 82
What did Windelband mean by calling the new science the daughter of humanism?
Dewey cites Windelband's saying that the new science of nature was the daughter of humanism. The fifteenth-century revival of learning brought a naturalistic interest in man's present life, and educated men turned to Greek literature for reinforcement; the mental freedom and sense of nature's order they found there inspired similar untrammeled thinking and observation, giving the dawning physical sciences their points of departure.
Chapter 82
What four reasons does Dewey give for the later split between literature and physical science?
Dewey suggests four: (a) the old tradition was entrenched in institutions like politics, law, and diplomacy, and teachers were rarely trained in science; (b) the Protestant revolt increased theological controversy, capturing linguistic training for religious education; (c) the natural sciences were conceived in ways that sharpened opposition between man and nature; and (d) an aristocratic tradition still looked down on material things, the senses, and the hands.
Chapter 82
How did Bacon's prophecy about science fall short according to Dewey?
Dewey argues Bacon prophesied the direction of progress but 'anticipated' the advance. Bacon thought the new science would rapidly give man new ends, but instead it put means at the disposal of a class to secure old ends of aggrandizement at another class's expense. Capitalism, not social humanism, replaced feudalism, and production and commerce ignored the new science's moral lessons.
Chapter 82

Section 834 cards

What two forms did the science-based philosophy take, according to Dewey?
Dewey says it was either dualistic, sharply dividing mind (man) from matter (nature), or openly mechanical, reducing the signal features of human life to illusion. The dualistic version let certain studies claim mental values and superiority; the mechanical version provoked a reaction that treated physical science as an enemy of man's higher interests.
Chapter 83
How did the new science treat qualities like sounds, colors, and goods?
The new science was expounded to deny the reality of all qualities in objective existence, treating sounds, colors, ends, goods and bads as purely subjective impressions in the mind. Objective existence was left with only quantitative aspects: mass in motion, differing only in aggregate amount and rate of motion at points in space.
Chapter 83
Why does Dewey say mechanical philosophy misrepresents science's genuine purport?
Dewey argues it takes the technique for the thing itself—apparatus, terminology, and method for reality. Science confines statements to conditions enabling prediction and control, ignoring qualities, which gives it a mechanical, quantitative character. But ignoring qualities does not exclude them from reality or relegate them to a purely mental region; science only furnishes means utilizable for ends.
Chapter 83
What educational problem does Dewey identify regarding science and humanistic studies?
Dewey says education should start from the close interdependence of humanistic and naturalistic studies, cross-fertilizing them rather than keeping science apart from literature and history. Teaching sciences as technical bodies of information and humanistic studies as isolated subjects creates an artificial separation in pupils' experience, making studies feel unreal and depriving students of normal motive for interest.
Chapter 83

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What does Dewey say is the pedagogical starting point for science instruction?
Dewey argues that scientific instruction should begin not with subjects labeled science but with familiar occupations and appliances, using them to direct observation and experiment. Pupils then arrive at fundamental principles by understanding them in their familiar practical workings, since everyday life is already bound up with industrial processes that are science in action.
Chapter 84
How does Dewey answer the charge that studying science in its practical applications degrades its purity?
Dewey calls this opinion a misunderstanding. He argues any subject is cultural to the degree it is grasped in its widest range of meanings, and perceiving meanings depends on perceiving connections and context. Seeing a scientific fact in its human as well as technical context enlarges its significance; direct economic application is incidental and secondary, but the important thing is grasping the fact in its social connections and function in life.
Chapter 84
What does Dewey mean by humanism, and how does he criticize mere accumulation of knowledge?
Dewey argues humanism means being imbued with an intelligent sense of human interests, with social interest as supreme. Knowledge about man, literature, or physical facts can all be equally technical possessions. Unless such activity enlarges the imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with children's busy work—the letter without the spirit—degenerating into a miser's accumulation where one prides oneself on what one has rather than meaning found in life.
Chapter 84
How does Dewey contrast Greek humanism with the effects of modern science on culture?
Dewey argues Greek humanism was native and intense but narrow: everyone outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian, and higher culture rested on slavery and economic serfdom. Modern science produced an industrial revolution bringing peoples into close contact through colonization and commerce, abolishing agricultural serfdom and creating organized factory laborers with political rights. The older humanism omitted economic and industrial conditions, making it one-sided and aristocratic.
Chapter 84

Section 854 cards

According to Dewey, how did Greek and medieval periods view the individual in relation to knowledge?
The author argues that in both Greek and medieval periods the individual was regarded as a channel through which a universal and divine intelligence operated. The individual was not truly the knower; the knower was the "Reason" operating through him. Individual interference was thought to bring conceit, error, and opinion in place of true knowledge.
Chapter 85
What did Dewey say the practical individualist movement actually sought, contrary to philosophic subjectivism?
The author argues the movement was misconceived: people sought greater freedom in nature and society, not isolation from them. They wanted power to initiate changes, closer union with fellows, and to form beliefs at first hand rather than through tradition. Translating this into philosophic subjectivism was a perversion, not a transcript.
Chapter 85
What educational antitheses does Dewey link to the dualistic philosophy of mind and world?
Dewey identifies the supposed antithesis between subject matter (counterpart of the world) and method (counterpart of mind), and the tendency to treat interest as something purely private without intrinsic connection to the material studied. He also says the dualism implies erroneous views of knowledge versus social interests and of individuality versus social control.
Chapter 85
Why did the isolation of mind from the world give rise to epistemology as a major philosophical problem?
Once mind was identified with a self-sufficient self set apart from the world, a gulf opened between knower and known. It then became a question how knowledge is possible at all, requiring theories to explain how subject and object connect. This preoccupation produced theories that we know only impressions, or only the mind's own states.
Chapter 85

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How does Dewey describe the relation between the individual and the social medium in gaining mind?
The author argues every individual grows up in a social medium and acquires a mind of his own through social intercourse and sharing in activities embodying beliefs. The notion of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is, he says, at the antipodes of the truth; the self does not build up knowledge anew on its own account.
Chapter 86
What distinction does Dewey draw between knowledge and thinking?
Knowledge is what we take for granted—settled, established, under control, a practical readiness to act without quibble, though it may be mistaken. Thinking, by contrast, starts from doubt or uncertainty and is an inquiring, searching attitude. Through its critical process, true knowledge is revised and extended and convictions reorganized.
Chapter 86
What role does Dewey assign to the individual in knowledge?
The author argues the individual's role is the redirection or reconstruction of accepted beliefs. New ideas must originate in an individual, but custom-governed societies tend to suppress deviations, and the man who sees things differently becomes a suspect character. Freedom of observation and imagination in the scientific revolution had to be fought for.
Chapter 86
What four typical ways do moral philosophies handle the problem of isolated consciousnesses?
Dewey lists four typical ways but the text details the first: the older authoritative position, which still suspects individual deviation in principle while tolerating intellectual individualism in technical regions like mathematics, physics, and astronomy. In moral, social, legal, and political matters, dogma remains supreme, and education emphasizes the authority of book and teacher.
Chapter 86

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What did Dewey see as the strengths and limits of rationalism in education?
The author argues rationalism, which sets up a formal logical faculty apart from tradition and concrete subject matter, helped dissolve doctrines backed only by tradition and class interest, encouraged free discussion, and undermined prejudice and brute force. But its formal, empty reason left it impotent at suggesting specific aims and methods; bare logic cannot spin new subject matter out of itself. In education it correlates with trust in ready-made rules to secure agreement.
Chapter 87
How did English thought seek social unity, and what was its flaw?
English thought appealed to intelligent self-interest: legal and penal arrangements and education were to keep private pursuits from interfering with others, with chief emphasis on trade, where each satisfies his own wants by furnishing goods or services to others. Dewey says it promoted democratic concern and rescued work from contempt, but its premise that all acts stem from self-pleasure made union a calculation of externals, a 'cash nexus.'
Chapter 87
How did German absolute idealism differ from French rationalism educationally?
German thought synthesized Cartesian rationalism with the divine mind, making reason absolute: nature is incarnate reason and history is reason's progressive unfolding, so an individual becomes rational by absorbing rationality from nature and institutions. Dewey notes it rescued philosophy from individualism and promoted organized state education and free inquiry in technical details, but in ultimate moral matters it reinstated authority and made no provision for free experimental modification, being foreign to political democracy.
Chapter 87
What does Dewey say freedom in learning really means?
Dewey argues the essence of the demand for freedom is conditions enabling an individual to make his own special contribution to a group interest and to partake in activities so that social guidance becomes his own mental attitude rather than authoritative dictation. Freedom means the part played by personal thinking in learning: intellectual initiative, independence in observation, judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation.
Chapter 87

Section 884 cards

How does Dewey link mental freedom to physical movement in learning?
Dewey argues that because mental activity is the mental phase of behavior, freedom of individuality cannot be separated from free physical movement. Enforced physical quietude may hinder realizing a problem, making observations, and performing experiments that test ideas. He says "self-activity" is often wrongly restricted to something merely internal, excluding free use of sensory and motor organs.
Chapter 88
What double meaning does Dewey give to individuality in education?
First, one is mentally an individual only by having one's own purpose and problem and doing one's own thinking; Dewey calls "think for one's self" a pleonasm, since otherwise it isn't thinking. Second, people vary in point of view, appeal of objects, and mode of attack. Suppressing these variations for uniformity produces confusion, artificiality, destroyed originality, and either docility or wild ideas.
Chapter 88
How does Dewey answer the objection that pupils cannot be original?
Dewey replies in two ways. First, he means originality of attitude—the unforced response of one's own individuality—not originality measured by product; genuine discovery can occur from the learner's own standpoint. Second, even young pupils react in unexpected, fresh ways to known subject matter. Brushing this aside makes teaching mechanical and deprives the teacher of new points of view and intellectual companionship.
Chapter 88
What does Dewey say makes a student intellectually free?
Dewey says freedom in teaching and studying is the thinking by which what one already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If attention centers on conditions favorable to effective thinking, freedom takes care of itself. The intellectually free individual has a real question that stirs curiosity, seeks information to cope with it, and has equipment letting those interests take effect; his own purposes direct his actions.
Chapter 88

Section 894 cards

According to Dewey, what is true individualism a product of?
The author argues true individualism arises from the relaxation of the grip of custom and tradition as standards of belief. It is a comparatively modern manifestation, aside from sporadic instances like the height of Greek thought. Individual diversities have always existed, but societies dominated by conservative custom repress them or fail to utilize and promote them.
Chapter 89
How does Dewey define a vocation?
A vocation means such a direction of life activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person because of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to associates. Its opposite is not leisure or culture but aimlessness, capriciousness, and absence of cumulative achievement, plus idle display and parasitic dependence socially. Occupation is a concrete term for continuity, including artistic, scientific, and civic capacities.
Chapter 89
Why does Dewey reject the idea of one exclusive vocation per person?
The author argues such restricted specialism is impossible and absurd. Each individual has a variety of callings—family member, friend, self-supporter, citizen—and any occupation isolated from other interests becomes a routine. Efficiency in a specialized calling depends on association with other callings; the artist must live and have experience beyond art. Education should safeguard against vocations becoming too absorbing.
Chapter 89
What did Plato get right and wrong about vocational education?
Dewey says Plato laid down the fundamental principle that education should discover what each person is good for and train mastery of that excellence, securing social needs harmoniously. The author argues Plato's error was not the qualitative principle but his limited conception of the scope of socially needed vocations, which obscured his perception of the infinite variety of individual capacities.
Chapter 89

Section 904 cards

Why does Dewey claim education through occupations is superior to other methods?
The author argues an occupation is continuous activity with a purpose, so it calls instincts and habits into play and opposes passive receptivity. Because results are to be accomplished, it appeals to thought and demands a steadily maintained idea of an end, preventing activity from becoming routine or capricious. Its progressive movement requires observation and ingenuity at each stage to overcome obstacles and readapt means.
Chapter 90
How does a calling organize knowledge, according to Dewey?
The author argues a calling acts as an organizing principle for information and ideas, providing an axis through diverse detail so experiences and facts fall into order. The lawyer, physician, chemist, parent, or local citizen is stimulated to note and relate whatever concerns them, reaching out for relevant information and holding it. The vocation is both magnet and glue, and such organization is vital because it references needs and is readjusted in action.
Chapter 90
What does Dewey say about predetermining a future occupation through education?
The author argues the dominant vocation of all humans is living—intellectual and moral growth—and that predetermining a future occupation for which education is strict preparation injures present development and reduces adequate preparation for future employment. Such training may develop machine-like routine skill, though it may instead breed distaste and carelessness, at the expense of alert observation and coherent planning.
Chapter 90
How does Dewey describe vocational guidance and the discovery of aptitudes?
The author argues earlier preparation for vocations should be indirect, through active occupations indicated by pupils' needs and interests, allowing genuine discovery of aptitudes. Discovery is a continuous process as long as growth continues; choosing a calling is like Columbus touching America's shores, a rough sketch for further activity. Treating vocational guidance as a definitive, irretrievable choice makes education and the vocation rigid, hampering growth.
Chapter 90

Section 914 cards

What 'superstition' does Dewey identify about liberal education?
The author argues that education preparing people for conspicuous idleness, teaching, literary callings, and leadership is wrongly regarded as non-vocational and peculiarly cultural. Teachers and authors defend cultural education against specialized practical education without recognizing that their own supposedly liberal training was mainly preparation for their particular calling.
Chapter 91
What five causes does Dewey give for the new emphasis on vocational education?
Dewey lists: (i) greater democratic esteem for manual labor and tangible service; (ii) the vast growth of industrial vocations and their social importance; (iii) industry's shift from rule-of-thumb custom to technological, science-based technique; (iv) knowledge itself becoming more experimental and less literary; and (v) advances in the psychology of learning and childhood.
Chapter 91
How does technology change workers' relation to their tools, per Dewey?
Under the old craft regime, workers used tools under their direct command and were roughly equal in knowledge, developing personal ingenuity within a narrow range. Now the operator must adjust to the machine rather than the tool to his purposes. Though industry's intellectual possibilities multiplied, industrial conditions make it less educative for the masses, throwing the burden of realizing those possibilities back on the school.
Chapter 91
What danger does Dewey see in vocational education, and what should it instead do?
The author warns that vocational education may be interpreted as trade education—securing technical efficiency in specialized pursuits—making schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce and perpetuating the existing industrial order unchanged. Instead, education should use the factors of industry to make school life more active, meaningful, and connected to out-of-school experience, operating as a means of social transformation.
Chapter 91

Section 924 cards

What does Dewey say a vocation signifies?
Dewey defines a vocation as any form of continuous activity that renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of accomplishing results. It is not limited to paid employment; the concept links thought with bodily activity, individual development with associated life, and making a livelihood with worthy enjoyment of leisure.
Chapter 92
What is the greatest evil of the present regime, according to the author?
The author argues the greatest evil is not poverty and its suffering, but that many people have callings that make no appeal to them and are pursued only for money. Such callings provoke aversion, ill will, and evasion, so neither hearts nor minds are in the work. The wealthy, meanwhile, are cut off from equal social intercourse.
Chapter 92
How does a narrowly conceived vocational education perpetuate social division?
Dewey warns it assumes social predestination: some remain wage earners and receive only technical trade education for efficiency, while the economically able get liberal, cultural education fitting them for directive power. This transfers the old division of labor and leisure, culture and service, mind and body, into a nominally democratic society.
Chapter 92
What would an education acknowledging the full meaning of a vocation include?
Dewey says it would include instruction in the historic background of present conditions; training in science for intelligence and initiative with materials of production; and study of economics, civics, and politics to connect workers with current problems and proposed improvements. Above all, it would train power of readaptation to changing conditions.
Chapter 92

Section 934 cards

According to Dewey, what two fundamental questions does vocational education concentrate?
Dewey says vocational education concentrates two issues: whether intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity that puts nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured under egoistic or social conditions. He frames this as the crucial reason vocational education is presently so important, and notes the chapter only summarizes earlier chapters XV to XXII.
Chapter 93
How does Dewey divide the prior chapters logically into three parts?
Dewey groups them as: first, education as a social need and function, the process by which groups maintain continuous existence; second, analysis under the democratic criterion, implying continuous reconstruction of experience and outlining subject matter and method; third, consideration of present limitations on realizing the democratic criterion, traced to segregated domains and social class divisions.
Chapter 93
What does Dewey identify as the underlying assumption behind the dualisms?
Dewey argues the fundamental assumption beneath dualisms like labor and leisure, practical and intellectual activity, and culture and vocation is an isolation of mind from activity involving physical conditions, bodily organs, material appliances, and natural objects. He contrasts this with a philosophy recognizing mind's origin, place, and function in activity that controls the environment.
Chapter 93
How does Dewey define the problems philosophy deals with and their origin?
Dewey says philosophy's problems, such as mind and matter, body and soul, humanity and physical nature, individual and social, and theory and practice, originate in conflicts and difficulties of social life. Philosophical systems record the main lineaments and difficulties of contemporary social practice, bringing to explicit consciousness what people have come to think about nature, themselves, and reality.
Chapter 93

Section 944 cards

How does Dewey distinguish philosophy from science regarding conduct?
Dewey argues that particular scientific facts and laws influence conduct by suggesting things to do and providing means of execution. But when science becomes a general attitude toward the world rather than specific things to do, it merges into philosophy. Philosophy concerns the underlying disposition governing conduct, not this or that thing nor even the aggregate of known things.
Chapter 94
What does Dewey mean by 'totality' in philosophy?
Dewey argues totality does not mean a quantitative summation of all facts, which is hopeless. It means consistency of mode of response across the plurality of events—continuity, carrying on a former habit of action with readaptation to keep it alive and growing. It means keeping balance among diverse actions so each borrows and gives significance to every other.
Chapter 94
What does Dewey say 'finality' in philosophy means?
Dewey argues finality does not mean experience is ended and exhausted. It means the disposition to penetrate to deeper levels of meaning—to go below the surface, find the connections of any event or object, and keep at it. Taken literally, ultimateness would be an absurd pretension indicating insanity.
Chapter 94
Why does Dewey say conflicting interests produce philosophy?
Dewey argues the demand for a total attitude arises from the need to integrate conflicting interests in action—scientific versus religious, economic versus aesthetic, order versus freedom, institutionalism versus individuality. Individuals may settle clashes with homespun philosophies, but systems of philosophy arise when discrepant ideals affect the community as a whole and readjustment is general.
Chapter 94

Section 954 cards

Why are philosophy's roots in social difficulties often hidden?
The author argues philosophers become a specialized class using technical language unlike the vocabulary of direct difficulties. Yet where a system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of interests calling for social adjustment can always be discovered. Education offers a vantage ground to penetrate the human rather than technical significance of philosophic discussions.
Chapter 95
How does Dewey define philosophy in relation to education?
If education is conceived as the process of forming fundamental intellectual and emotional dispositions toward nature and fellow men, the author argues philosophy may be defined as the general theory of education. 'Philosophy of education' is not an external application of ready-made ideas but an explicit formulation of problems of forming right mental and moral habitudes amid contemporary social difficulties.
Chapter 95
What double task does Dewey assign to philosophy?
The author argues philosophy has a double task: criticizing existing aims with respect to the existing state of science, pointing out values obsolete with new resources and values merely sentimental for lack of means; and interpreting results of specialized science in their bearing on future social endeavor. It cannot succeed without educational equivalents as to what to do and not do.
Chapter 95
Why did European philosophy originate under pressure of educational questions?
The author argues European philosophy originated among the Athenians under direct pressure of educational questions. The Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe, instructed youth in virtue, political arts, and management of city and household, prompting philosophy to address relations of individual to universal, man and nature, tradition and reflection, knowledge and action.
Chapter 95

Section 964 cards

How does Dewey define philosophy in relation to education?
The author argues philosophy is the generalized theory of education. Like all thinking, it begins in uncertainty, locates the perplexity, and frames hypotheses tested in action. Its differentia is that it deals with widespread social uncertainties arising from conflicts of organized interests and institutional claims. Because readjustment requires changed emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy formulates life's interests and proposes methods for balancing them; education makes the transformation actual rather than hypothetical.
Chapter 96
What is the origin of dualistic philosophies, according to Dewey?
The author argues dualisms originate in hard social barriers dividing groups and classes—rich and poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. Such barriers mean no fluent, free intercourse, producing separate types of life-experience with isolated subject matter, aims, and values. Any such social condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy if philosophy is to sincerely account for experience. Philosophies that deny duality only by appeal to a transcendental realm restore it as appearance versus inaccessible essence.
Chapter 96
How does the empirical versus rational knowing opposition map onto education?
The author argues empirical knowing serves everyday affairs and the ordinary individual, while rational knowing is supposedly pursued for its own sake as pure theory. Socially this matches working-class versus learned-class intelligence; philosophically it turns on particular versus universal. In education, pupils are thought to learn isolated items of information on one hand and general laws on the other—geography illustrating the former, mathematics beyond rudimentary figuring the latter—representing two independent worlds.
Chapter 96
What two senses of 'learning' create a dualism in Dewey's account?
The author argues learning means either the sum total of what is known, handed down by books and learned men as external, ready-made truth stored like commodities in a warehouse, or what the individual actively does when studying—a personally conducted affair. This yields the dualism of objective knowledge versus subjective knowing, a ready-made body of truth versus a ready-made mind with a faculty of knowing. Its educational equivalent is the separation of subject matter from method.
Chapter 96

Section 974 cards

According to Dewey, what does the brain actually do, contrary to older dualisms?
The author argues the brain is not an organ of knowing isolated from motor organs. Physiology shows the nervous system is a specialized mechanism keeping all bodily activities working together. The brain effects reciprocal adjustment between stimuli from the environment and responses directed upon it: responses shape the next sensory stimulus, as when a carpenter works a board. It is machinery for constant reorganizing of activity to maintain continuity.
Chapter 97
What does Dewey say the doctrine of evolution implies about knowledge?
The author argues evolution's philosophic significance lies in emphasizing continuity from simpler to more complex organic forms up to man. As activity grows more complex, coordinating more factors in space and time, intelligence plays a larger role by forecasting and planning for a larger span of the future. This displaces the notion of knowing as a spectator's activity: the living creature participates in the world, and knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable insofar as it is effective.
Chapter 97
What two sides does Dewey give the experimental method of knowing?
The author argues experimental method means, first, we may call nothing knowledge unless our activity has produced physical changes in things confirming our conception; short of that, beliefs are only hypotheses to be held tentatively. Second, it signifies thinking is of avail when anticipation of future consequences rests on thorough observation of present conditions. Experiment is not blind reacting; consequences must be noted and used for future predictions. Magic was the savage's experiment—trying luck, not ideas.
Chapter 97
Why does Dewey say experimental method's scope in social and moral matters is unrecognized?
The author argues experimental method is new as a systematized scientific resource, though old as a practical device, so its full scope goes unrecognized; most regard it as belonging to technical and physical matters only. He contends it applies equally to forming and testing ideas in social and moral matters. Men still want the crutch of dogma fixed by authority, relieving them of thinking; hence schools, as Mill said, make disciples rather than inquirers.
Chapter 97

Section 984 cards

According to Dewey, what is the function of knowledge in experience?
The author argues knowledge's function is to make one experience freely available in other experiences. "Freely" distinguishes knowledge from habit: habit assumes new situations resemble old ones and fails with novelty, while knowledge perceives connections that determine an object's applicability, allowing selection from a wider range of habits.
Chapter 98
How does Dewey contrast habit with knowledge?
Habit modifies a person through experience, predisposing easier action in a like direction, but it makes no allowance for change or novelty and assumes the new situation resembles the old. Knowledge, by contrast, is perception of connections determining applicability, so a man who understands a machine can readapt when something unexpected occurs.
Chapter 98
What two aspects of knowledge's availability does Dewey distinguish?
Dewey distinguishes increased power of control—handling indirectly what cannot be managed directly, interposing barriers, or evading consequences—and increased meaning or experienced significance. Even when practical control fails, knowledge yields the satisfaction of experiencing a meaning rather than merely reacting physically.
Chapter 98
What does Dewey say about knowledge's content versus its reference?
The author argues knowledge's content is what has happened, settled and sure, but its reference is future or prospective: it supplies means for interpreting what is still going on. When cut off from use, knowledge drops from consciousness or becomes aesthetic contemplation—legitimate satisfaction, but aesthetic, not intellectual.
Chapter 98

Section 994 cards

According to Dewey, what was the scholastic method originally relevant to, and what does it mean now?
Dewey says the scholastic method developed when it had social relevance: it systematized and gave rational sanction to material accepted on authority, and that subject matter vitalized its defining and classifying. Under present conditions, he argues, it means for most persons a form of knowing with no especial connection to particular subject matter—making distinctions, definitions, divisions, and classifications for their own sake, with no objective in experience.
Chapter 99
What is the doctrine of formal discipline, and what does Dewey link it to?
Dewey calls the doctrine of formal discipline in education the natural counterpart of the scholastic method. He traces both to the view of thought as a purely physical activity with its own forms, applied to any material like a seal stamped on plastic stuff—the view underlying what is termed formal logic, which he describes as essentially the scholastic method generalized.
Chapter 99
How does Dewey define reason and being reasonable?
Dewey says 'reason' is just the ability to bring the subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is reasonable in the degree to which he is habitually open to seeing an event that immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its connection with the common experience of mankind.
Chapter 99
What is the essential feature of Dewey's pragmatic theory of the method of knowing?
Dewey says the theory advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic; its essential feature is maintaining the continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. Knowledge in the strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual resources—habits that render action intelligent. Only what is organized into disposition so we can adapt environment to needs and aims to situation is really knowledge, not just what we are now conscious of.
Chapter 99

Section 1003 cards

What does Dewey identify as the mental or psychical phase of activity?
Dewey says there is one continuous behavior moving from an uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more overt, determinate, complete state. The explicitly conscious phase may be called mental or psychical, but that only names the indeterminate, formative stage of an activity which in fullness involves putting forth overt energy to modify the environment. There is no abrupt jump from a purely psychical to a physical process.
Chapter 100
How does Dewey explain the historical split between inner morality and outer conduct?
Dewey argues the split can be social, not just individual: when a class given to reflection lacks means to reorganize its environment, it takes refuge in inner states, calling them more real and ideal than the outer world. He cites Stoicism and early Christianity, and later Kant's good will as sole moral good. Hedonism and utilitarianism reacted by making conduct and consequences the measure of morality.
Chapter 100
What educational method does Dewey say avoids both inner-morality and mere-conduct evils?
Dewey argues both evils arise where individuals cannot engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking that engages their interest and requires reflection. Given a consecutive activity embodying the student's own interest, with a definite result to obtain, where neither routine habit, dictated directions, nor capricious improvising suffices, conscious purpose and deliberate reflection arise inevitably—as the spirit of an activity with specific consequences, not an isolated inner realm.
Chapter 100

Section 1014 cards

What false assumption underlies the opposition between acting from principle and from interest?
Dewey argues both sides assume the self is a fixed, isolated quantity existing antecedent to action. This creates a rigid dilemma: either one acts for the self's possessions (fame, power, profit, pleasure) or with no interest at all. Dewey counters that the self is in continuous formation through choice of action, so self and interest are two names for the same fact.
Chapter 101
How does Dewey define unselfishness, and what two features characterize it?
Dewey argues unselfishness is neither lack of interest (machine-like indifference) nor selflessness (absence of character). It refers to the kind of aims that habitually interest a person, with two features: the generous self consciously identifies with the full range of relationships implied in its activity rather than excluding them as alien; and it readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new consequences as they become perceptible.
Chapter 101
According to Dewey, what really carries a person through hard stretches when interest flags?
Dewey argues it is not loyalty to abstract duty but interest in one's occupation as a whole—its continuous development. Duties are 'offices,' the specific acts needed to fulfill a function, or doing one's job. The person genuinely interested in the job stands temporary discouragement, persists through obstacles, and makes an interest out of meeting and overcoming difficulties and distraction.
Chapter 101
What does Dewey mean by acting 'from principle' in a crisis of readjustment?
Dewey argues it is not acting on some abstract duty at large but acting upon the principle of a course of action rather than upon the circumstances attending it. Principle is another name for the continuity of the activity—its animating aim and spirit, like the physician's care for the diseased. Dewey warns that one who prides himself on acting on principle may insist on his own way without learning from experience, forgetting that his principle needs justification.
Chapter 101

Section 1024 cards

What paradox about morals does Dewey identify in discussions of moral education?
Dewey notes that reason is often set up as the source of moral intuitions and the only proper moral motive, yet concrete everyday intelligence is underestimated or deliberately depreciated. Morals is treated as having nothing to do with ordinary knowledge, and conscience as radically different from consciousness. He argues this separation makes moral education in schools practically hopeless when knowledge and understanding are treated as unrelated to character.
Chapter 102
Why does Dewey say direct instruction in morals is ineffective in a democratic society?
Dewey argues lessons about morals merely teach what other people think about virtues and duties. They influence character only if pupils already have sympathetic regard for others' sentiments; otherwise they have no more influence than information about Asian mountains, and a servile regard increases dependence on authority. Such instruction worked only in groups under authoritative control of the many by the few, reinforced by the whole regime. In a democracy, relying on it is sentimental magic.
Chapter 102
How does Dewey reinterpret the Socratic-Platonic claim that knowledge is virtue?
Dewey says the issue turns on what knowledge means. Aristotle objected that people know good yet do bad, requiring habituation and motive, but he ignored Plato's point that insight into the good comes only through years of practical habituation and discipline. Dewey distinguishes vital personal realization, tested in experience, from secondhand symbolic recognition of what others believe. The latter does not guarantee conduct; knowledge like knowing sugar is sweet does issue in action.
Chapter 102
What does Dewey mean by saying the problem of moral education is one with securing knowledge?
Dewey argues knowledge gained firsthand through the exigencies of experience affects conduct significantly, while knowledge learned only for recitation influences just the reproducing of statements. Knowledge's use depends on its connections: a safecracker's and a chemist's knowledge of dynamite differ because knit into different aims and habits. Studies representing standard factors in social life are organs of initiation into social values; acquired with social significance realized, they feed moral interest and insight.
Chapter 102

Section 1034 cards

According to Dewey, what is the relationship between morals and social conduct?
The author argues that the moral and social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis, identical. Morals are as broad as acts concerning our relationships with others, potentially including all acts, since every act modifies disposition through habit and may later influence association with others. Virtues like honesty and truthfulness are moral in an emphatic sense because they are central and carry other attitudes, not because they are isolated.
Chapter 103
Why does Dewey say calling virtues in isolation is like taking the skeleton for the living body?
The author argues that virtues are moral in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated and exclusive but because they are intimately connected with thousands of other attitudes we do not explicitly recognize. To call them virtues in their isolation is like taking the skeleton for the living body: bones are important because they support other organs enabling integrated effective activity. Likewise, morals concern the whole character, not a few namable exclusive traits.
Chapter 103
What two conditions must be met for a social spirit to be actively present in school?
The author argues the school must itself be a community life, with give and take in building common experience; constructive activities, playgrounds, shops, and laboratories afford this social atmosphere. Second, learning in school should be continuous with that out of school, with free interplay and numerous points of contact between social interests, so school knowledge carries over rather than remaining isolated like a monastery's.
Chapter 103
What does Dewey identify as the great danger threatening school work and moral training?
The author argues the great danger is the absence of conditions making possible a permeating social spirit, which is the great enemy of effective moral training. Without an intimate organic connection between methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular lessons and discipline must be resorted to; knowledge is not integrated into springs of action, and morals become moralistic—a scheme of separate virtues.
Chapter 103

Section 1043 cards

Which two theories separate learning from activity and morals, according to Dewey?
The author identifies two: one cuts off inner disposition and motive (the conscious personal factor) from deeds treated as purely physical and outer; the other sets action from interest in opposition to action from principle. Dewey argues both separations are overcome in an educational scheme where learning accompanies continuous activities or occupations with a social aim that use materials of typical social situations.
Chapter 104
How does Dewey say the school becomes a form of social life?
When learning accompanies continuous activities or occupations that have a social aim and use the materials of typical social situations, the school becomes itself a form of social life—a miniature community in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond school walls. Dewey argues that under such conditions education develops the power to share effectively in social life.
Chapter 104
What does Dewey claim makes all education moral?
The author argues that all education which develops the power to share effectively in social life is moral. It forms a character that not only performs the particular socially necessary deed but is interested in the continuous readjustment essential to growth. Interest in learning from all the contacts of life, Dewey concludes, is the essential moral interest.
Chapter 104

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All questions and answers

For Dewey, what most notably distinguishes living from inanimate things?

Why does Dewey say education is necessary for social continuity?

How does the gap between immature capacities and adult standards change with civilization?

By what process does society exist, according to Dewey?

According to Dewey, what makes society's renewal through transmission not automatic?

What distinguishes a community from a machine-like group, per Dewey?

Why does Dewey claim all communication is educative for both parties?

How does Dewey distinguish incidental education from deliberate formal education?

Why does formal schooling arise as civilizations advance, according to Dewey?

What dangers does Dewey say accompany the shift from informal to formal education?

How does Dewey describe education in undeveloped social groups?

What balance does Dewey say the philosophy of education must maintain?

How does Dewey say beliefs and aspirations are communicated to the young?

What does Dewey mean by environment, as opposed to mere surroundings?

What distinguishes training from educative teaching for Dewey?

How does a warlike tribe shape a boy's mental habitudes, per Dewey?

According to Dewey, what two steps make the social medium educative?

How does Dewey explain a child learning the word 'hat'?

How does Dewey apply shared activity to learning about a Greek helmet from words?

What does Dewey say social environment does versus conscious teaching?

What three functions does Dewey assign to the school as a special environment?

Why does Dewey say the school must balance the social environment?

What three functions does Dewey assign the special school environment?

Why did the demand for a common school arise in the United States?

How does Dewey distinguish guidance, control, and direction?

According to Dewey, what are the two aspects of direction?

Why does Dewey say purely external direction is impossible?

What mistake does Dewey warn against when controlling others?

What distinction does Dewey draw between physical and moral results?

According to Dewey, when should conscious acts of control be limited?

What does Dewey call the more important and permanent mode of control?

Why does Dewey reject separating physical from social environment?

How does Dewey define a mental act versus adjustment to a physical stimulus?

According to Dewey, what distinguishes blind training from genuine education?

What makes pulling a rope a genuinely shared activity rather than mere juxtaposition?

How does an infant's crying become socially directed rather than merely organic?

Why are blushing, frowning, and gestures not expressive in themselves?

What does Dewey say is the fundamental means of social control?

Why does Dewey call the imitation theory of social control a basic error?

What does Dewey say actually produces the effect attributed to imitation?

In Dewey's ball-rolling example, what is the child actually imitating?

According to Dewey, what causes the difference between savage and civilized groups?

What does Dewey say civilization's material appliances and tools accomplish for education?

Why does Dewey say language plays a large part in intentional education?

Why does Dewey claim bookish schooling contradicts its own aim?

How does Dewey describe children's dependence and social capacity?

What does Dewey say schools need for full efficiency?

What does Dewey say dependence denotes from a social standpoint?

How does Dewey distinguish plasticity from the plasticity of putty or wax?

Why does prolonged infancy matter for social life, according to Dewey?

How does Dewey contrast habituation with active habits using the savage and civilized examples?

According to Dewey, what does a habit involve beyond motor efficiency?

When do habits become routine or enslaving, according to the chapter?

What two educational equivalents follow from Dewey's conclusion that life is development?

What educational failures does Dewey link to the false idea of growth as movement toward a fixed goal?

According to Dewey, what is the finest product of schooling?

How does Dewey redefine immaturity, and what does this mean for instruction?

What two forms do habits take, and how do they relate to growth?

What three undesirable results follow from treating education as preparation?

How does Dewey distinguish genuine growth from the 'unfolding' doctrine of development?

What practical problem does Dewey identify with teaching methods based on 'drawing out' latent powers?

How does Dewey evaluate Froebel's kindergarten symbolism and its influence?

What did Hegel's philosophy contribute to educational thought, according to Dewey?

How did Hegel's absolute goal affect his view of individuals and education?

How was the organic-whole conception of society used, and what did Dewey object to?

What is the theory of formal discipline, and what does Dewey say is wrong with it?

Why did Locke's faculty psychology seem practically useful to educators?

What is Dewey's first criticism of the supposed original faculties?

How does training original impulsive activities actually work, according to Dewey?

Why does Dewey say highly specialized training yields less educative quality?

What is the fundamental fallacy of the formal discipline theory?

How does Dewey compare narrow spelling drills to games and sports?

What criterion does Dewey give for selecting subject matter to observe and recall?

What does Dewey say is the result of the educative process?

How does Dewey criticize the unfolding theory of Froebel and Hegel?

What is Herbart's theory of education as formation?

What three educational implications does Dewey draw from Herbart's doctrine?

What does Dewey say the theory that mind is what has been taught reflects?

What does cultural recapitulation theory claim about children's education?