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recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties in
order to induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes
have a pocket) to apply that mind to the truths to be known.
Thus we have the spectacle of professional educators decrying
appeal to interest while they uphold with great dignity the need
of reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and emotions,
prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of rewards and
punishments. The effect of this situation in crippling the
teacher's sense of humor has not received the attention which it
deserves.
All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and
doing, theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of
action and the body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat
what has been said about the source of this dualism in the
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Democracy and Education
252
division of society into a class laboring with their muscles for
material sustenance and a class which, relieved from economic
pressure, devotes itself to the arts of expression and social
direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again of the educational
evils which spring from the separation. We shall be content to
summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of this
conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity.
(i) The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with
it have shown the connection of mental activity with that of the
nervous system. Too often recognition of connection has stopped
short at this point; the older dualism of soul and body has been
replaced by that of the brain and the rest of the body. But in
fact the nervous system is only a specialized mechanism for
keeping all bodily activities working together. Instead of being
isolated from them, as an organ of knowing from organs of motor
response, it is the organ by which they interact responsively
with one another. The brain is essentially an organ for
effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli
received from the environment and responses directed upon it.
Note that the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables
organic activity to be brought to bear upon any object of the
environment in response to a sensory stimulation, but this
response also determines what the next stimulus will be. See
what happens, for example, when a carpenter is at work upon a
board, or an etcher upon his plate -- or in any case of a
consecutive activity. While each motor response is adjusted to
the state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that
motor response shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing
this illustration, the brain is the machinery for a constant
reorganizing of activity so as to maintain its continuity; that
is to say, to make such modifications in future action as are
required because of what has already been done. The continuity
of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a routine
repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random
activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it
continuous, consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act
prepares the way for later acts, while these take account of or
reckon with the results already attained -- the basis of all
responsibility. No one who has realized the full force of the
facts of the connection of knowing with the nervous system and of
the nervous system with the readjusting of activity continuously
to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing has to do with
reorganizing activity, instead of being something isolated from
all activity, complete on its own account.
(ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its
discovery of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the
doctrine of evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon
continuity of simpler and more complex organic forms until we
reach man. The development of organic forms begins with
structures where the adjustment of environment and organism is
obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is at a
minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a
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Democracy and Education
253
greater number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a
more and more marked role, for it has a larger span of the future
to forecast and plan for. The effect upon the theory of knowing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]