The assimilation of human science to physical science represents, in other words, only another form of absolutistic logic, a kind of physical absolutism.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
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To imagine that it would is simply to reduce human beings to the plane of inanimate things mechanically manipulated from without; it makes human education something like the training of fleas, dogs and horses.
To complete the picture we have to realize the difference which would be made in the methods of parents and teachers were there an adequate and generally shared knowledge of human nature.
A marked development of psychology and kindred subjects would change this situation.
But there is no comparable attention and willingness to expend funds to investigate the causes of these troubles.
The public pays generously to take care of the results of bad conditions.
But systematic expenditure of public funds for scientific inquiry into the conditions which affect the mental and moral development of children is just beginning, and demands for a large increase in this direction are looked upon askance.
It is a matter of analysis rather than of prophecy to say that the primary and chief effect of a better psychology would be found in education.
For increased knowledge of human nature would directly and in unpredictable ways modify the workings of human nature, and lead to the need of new methods of regulation, and so on without end.
If you want certain results, certain means must be found and employed.
But it is not often noted how fatal they are to the identification of social with physical uniformities.
When men have an idea of how social agencies work and their consequences are wrought, they at once strive to secure consequences as far as desirable and to avert them if undesirable.