The basic questions

TEXT 5

PRAGMATISM

Pragmatism, a philosophy that developed in the United States, stresses the need to test ideas by acting on them. Among its founders were Charles S. Peirce (1839 - 1914), William James (1842 - 1910), George Herbert Mead (1863 - 1931), and John Dewey (1859 - 1952). Peirce stressed the use of the scientific method in validating an idea; James applied pragmatic interpretations to psychology, religion, and education; and Mead emphasized the development of the child as a learning and experiencing human organism. Dewey in particular, wrote extensively on education. Here we will focus on his pragmatic or experimentalist philosophy, which was based on change, process, relativity, and the reconstruction of experience.

Dewey was a commanding figure in the field of education. He drew from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in applying the terms organism and environment to education. According to Dewey, the human being is a biological and sociological organism possessing drives or impulses that function to sustain life and to further growth and development. Every organism lives in a habitat or environment. In the process of living, the human organism experiences problematic situations that threaten his or her continued existence or that interfere with ongoing activities. The successful human being can solve these problems and add the details of the particular problem- solving episode to his or her general stock of experiences. In Dewey's philosophy of education, experience is the key word. Experience can be defined as the interaction of the human organism with its environment. Since living depends on the ability to solve problems, education becomes the means to cultivate problem-solving skills and methods.

Dewey's concept of experience was a key component of his experimentalist philosophy. Rejecting the a priori foundation of the older idealist, realist, and perennialist philosophical perspectives, Dewey's test of experience meant that human purposes and plans could be validated only by acting on them and judging them by their consequences. The need to judge by consequences also applied to educational programs. Did a particular educational program, curricular design, or methodological strategy achieve its anticipated goals and objectives? For Dewey, the only valid test was to try out the proposal and judge the results.

Whereas idealism, realism, perennialism, and essentialism all emphasized bodies of substantive knowledge or subject-matter disciplines, Dewey stressed the process of problem solving. According to Dewey, learning occurs as the person engages in problem solving. In Dewey's experimental epistemology, the learner, as an individual or as a member of a group, utilizes the scientific method to solve both personal and social problems. For Dewey, the problem-solving method can be developed into a habit that is transferable to a wide variety of situations.

KEY CONCEPTS

Metaphysics and Epistemology Where the more traditional philosophies of idealism and realism had a carefully separated metaphysics and epistemology pragmatism or experimentalism construed epistemology as a process in which reality is constantly changing.

The epistemological, or knowing, situation involves a person, an organism, and an environment. The person interacts with the environment in order to live, grow, and develop. This interaction may alter or change the environment, and it may also alter or change the person. Knowing is thus a transaction between the learner and the environment. Basic to this interaction is the concept of change. Each interaction may have some generalizable aspects or features that can be carried to the next interaction, but each episode is somewhat different. Thus, the person is constantly changing, the environment is constantly changing, and the experiences or transactions are also changing.

If reality is continually changing, then a curriculum based on permanent realities such as that of the perennialists or the essentialists cannot be acceptable for the pragmatists. What is needed is a method for dealing with change in an intelligent

manner. Since reality is a process of transformation or reconstruction of both the person and the environment, how can the course of change be directed toward desired outcomes? The Deweyites stress problem solving as the most effective and efficient method for dealing with the direction of change. Concepts of unchanging or universal truth, such as the realists and idealists suggest, become untenable. The only guides that human beings have in their interaction with the environment are established generalizations or tentative assertions that are subject to further research and verification. Each time a human experience is reconstructed to solve a problem, a new contribution is added to humanity's fund of experience.

Axiology and Logic Pragmatic conceptions of axiology are highly situational. Values are relative to time, place, and circumstance. What contributes to human and social growth and development is regarded as valuable; what restricts or contracts experience is unworthy. It is necessary to test and reexamine value assumptions in the same way that scientific claims are subjected to verification.

The logic used in experimentalist education is inductive and based on the scientific method. Tentative assertions are based on empirical experience and must be tested. Experimentalist logic is suspicious of a priori truths and deductions based on them.

THE BASIC QUESTIONS

The pragmatist answers to questions about knowledge, education, schooling, and instruction are very different from those of the more traditional schools of educational philosophy. For the pragmatists, knowledge is tentative and subject to revision. They are more concerned with the process of using knowledge than with truth as a body of knowledge. In contrast, the traditional philosophers emphasize truth as a permanent body of knowledge.

For the pragmatist, education is an experimental process; it is a method of dealing with and solving problems that arise as people interact with their world. Dewey argued that human beings experience the greatest personal and social growth when they interact with the environment in an intelligent and reflective manner. The most intelligent way of solving problems is to use the scientific method. When you face a problem, the information needed to solve the problem comes from many sources. It is interdisciplinary, rather than located within a single discipline or academic subject. For example, the information needed to define the problem of pollution of the physical environment and to suggest ways of solving it comes from many different sources. The factors that must be considered are historical, political, sociological, scientific, technological, and international. An educated person, in the pragmatic sense, knows how to take information from various sources and disciplines and use that knowledge in an instrumental manner. The more traditional philosophical perspectives represented by idealism, realism, perennialism, and essentialism are suspicious of the interdisciplinary approach in education because they believe that a student must first master organized subject matter before attempting to solve problems.

Pragmatists such as Dewey see the school as a specialized environment that is an extension of the more general social environment. For them, no separation exists between school and society. The school has a threefold function: to simplify, purify, and balance the cultural heritage. To simplify, the school selects elements of the heritage and reduces their complexity to appropriat units for learning. To purify, the school selects worthy elements of the cultural heritage and eliminates unworthy ones that limit human interaction and growth. To balance, the school integrates the selected and purified experience into a harmony. Since many different groups participate in society, the school assists the children of one group in understanding members of other social groups. As a genuinely integrated and democratic learning community, the school should be open to all.

Dewey, in particular, was an advocate of an open and sharing society. For him, quality and equity were not mutually exclusive. A society and its educational system reach their zenith when they provide for the widest possible sharing of resources among all people in the society. Sharing does not diminish quality but enriches it. In Dewey's terms, quality and equity are reciprocal and related social and educational "goods" to be shared by all.

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