 |
|
| |
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays
hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is
something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as
sensual, carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure
reason and spirit connote something morally praiseworthy.
Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the
inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
Democracy and Education
200
to experience. Its material is inherently variable and
untrustworthy. It is anarchic, because unstable. The man who
trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, since it
changes from person to person, from day to day, to say nothing of
from country to country. Its connection with the "many," with
various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries
conflict in its train.
Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out
of experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts
within the individual and between individuals. From experience
no standard of belief can issue, because it is the very nature of
experience to instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as
varieties of local custom proved. Its logical outcome is that
anything is good and true to the particular individual which his
experience leads him to believe true and good at a particular
time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity within
experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To
produce or to make is to alter something; to consume is to alter.
All the obnoxious characters of change and diversity thus attach
themselves to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object.
To know, to grasp a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to
be out of the region of vicissitude, chance, and diversity.
Truth has no lack; it is untouched by the perturbations of the
world of sense. It deals with the eternal and the universal.
And the world of experience can be brought under control, can be
steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law of
reason.
It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions
persisted in full technical definiteness. But they all of them
profoundly influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas
about education. The contempt for physical as compared with
mathematical and logical science, for the senses and sense
observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and worthy in the
degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with the
concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively
brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the
depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual
instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under
this estimate of the respective values of experience and
reason -- or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and
the intellectual. Medieval philosophy continued and reinforced
the tradition. To know reality meant to be in relation to the
supreme reality, or God, and to enjoy the eternal bliss of that
relation. Contemplation of supreme reality was the ultimate end
of man to which action is subordinate. Experience had to do with
mundane, profane, and secular affairs, practically necessary
indeed, but of little import in comparison with supernatural
objects of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force
derived from the literary character of the Roman education and
the Greek philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the
preference for studies which obviously demarcated the
Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
Democracy and Education
201
aristocratic class from the lower classes, we can readily
understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply
in educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The
Modern Theory of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see
later, the development of experimentation as a method of
knowledge makes possible and necessitates a radical
transformation of the view just set forth. But before coming to
that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge
developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In
general, it presents us with an almost complete reversal of the
classic doctrine of the relations of experience and reason. To
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plcs-sysunia.htw.pl
|
| |
|
|
|
| Podobne |
| |
|
| |
|