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something fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated
by even the most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the
topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them.
Too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are
deliberately held to rehearsing material in the exact form in
which the older person conceives it. The result is that what is
instinctively original in individuality, that which marks off one
from another, goes unused and undirected. Teaching then ceases
to be an educative process for the teacher. At most he learns
simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new
points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual
companionship. Hence both teaching and learning tend to become
conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both
sides therein implied.
As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background
of familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of
more or less random physical experimentation is reduced.
Activity is defined or specialized in certain channels. To the
eyes of others, the student may be in a position of complete
physical quietude, because his energies are confined to nerve
channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes and vocal
organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense mental
concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not
follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still
have to find their intellectual way about. And even with the
adult, it does not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. It
marks an intermediate period, capable of being lengthened with
increased mastery of a subject, but always coming between an
earlier period of more general and conspicuous organic action and
a later time of putting to use what has been apprehended.
When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind
and body in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist
upon the need of obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to
identify the freedom which is involved in teaching and studying
with the thinking by which what a person already knows and
believes is enlarged and refined. If attention is centered upon
the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a
situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care
of itself. The individual who has a question which being really
a question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his
eagerness for information that will help him cope with it, and
who has at command an equipment which will permit these interests
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Democracy and Education
230
to take effect, is intellectually free. Whatever initiative and
imaginative vision he possesses will be called into play and
control his impulses and habits. His own purposes will direct
his actions. Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his
memorizings and reproductions, will partake of intellectual
servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed
for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not
expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders
from the few set in authority. It is not adapted to a society
which intends to be democratic.
Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of
the grip of the authority of custom and traditions as standards
of belief. Aside from sporadic instances, like the height of
Greek thought, it is a comparatively modern manifestation. Not
but that there have always been individual diversities, but that
a society dominated by conservative custom represses them or at
least does not utilize them and promote them. For various
reasons, however, the new individualism was interpreted
philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for
revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an
assertion that each individual's mind was complete in isolation
from everything else. In the theoretical phase of philosophy,
this produced the epistemological problem: the question as to the
possibility of any cognitive relationship of the individual to
the world. In its practical phase, it generated the problem of
the possibility of a purely individual consciousness acting on
behalf of general or social interests, -- the problem of social
direction. While the philosophies which have been elaborated to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]