The person who holds the doctrine of “individualism” or “collectivism” has his program determined for him in advance.
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.
gutenberg.org
The appeal to causal forces at large not only misleads inquiry into social facts, but it affects equally seriously the formation of purposes and policies.
To know cause and effect is to know, in the abstract, the formula of correlation in change, and, in the concrete, a certain historical career of sequential events.
Whatever form it assumes, it results in strengthening the reign of dogma.
What we have termed the absolutistic logic ends, as far as method in social matters is concerned, in a substitution of discussion of concepts and their logical relations to one another for inquiry.
The habits thus formed would have entrusted to them the meeting of future social requirements and the development of the future state of society.
Every care would be taken to surround the young with the physical and social conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge extends, to release of personal potentialities.
The disciples of Lenin and Mussolini vie with the captains of capitalistic society in endeavoring to bring about a formation of dispositions and ideas which will conduce to a preconceived goal.
These considerations suggest a brief discussion of the effect of the present absolutistic logic upon the method and aims of education, not just in the sense of schooling but with respect to all the ways in which communities attempt to…
If any one supposes that it will, let him consider the applications of such remedial or preventive measures to a man in a state of savage culture and one in a modern community.
But control of these conditions will not determine the uses to which human beings will put their normalized potentialities.
Physiological chemistry, increased knowledge of the nervous system, of the processes and functions of glandular secretions, may in time enable us to deal with phenomena of emotional and intellectual disturbance before which mankind has…