INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13596, 1, '2023-04-23 14:35:55', '2023-04-23 14:35:55', 'A theory which has had great vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much influence is known as the theory of \"formal discipline.\" It has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he could without training: \"better\" signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy, promptness, etc. That this is an <a href=\"/forums/forum/topic/learning-outcome-benchmarks-for-primary-education-in-lagos-state/\" title=\"Learning Outcome Benchmarks For Primary Education in Lagos State\">outcome of education</a> was indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative development. \n\nBut the theory in question takes, as it were, a shortcut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth. There is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master. Consequently, education should get directly at the business of training them. But this implies that they are already there in some untrained form; otherwise, their creation would have to be an indirect product of other activities and agencies. Being there already in some crude form, all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions, and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase \"formal discipline\" as applied to this conception, \"discipline\" refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through repeated exercise.\n\nThe forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing, feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise upon the material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed by Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or content of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the other hand, the mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention, comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. \n\nKnowledge results if the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and divided in nature itself. But the important thing for education is the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till they become thoroughly established habits. The analogy constantly employed is that of a billiard player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way, at last, secures automatic skill. Even the faculty of thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke thought, mathematics affords unrivalled opportunity.\n\nLocke\'s statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which the mind should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few in number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. \n\nIt was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon the formation of intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own account; it was individualistic in placing the end of education in the perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the individual. This kind of distribution of values expressed with nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon Locke. It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a common place of educational theory and of psychology. \n\nPractically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite, instead of vague, tasks. It made the elaboration of a technique of instruction relatively easy. All that was necessary was to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers. This practice consists of repeated acts of attending, observing, memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making each set of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. There are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its educational application. \n\n(1) Perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed original faculties of observation, recollection, willingness, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies, and instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous system. There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. \n\nBut these tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they are tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment so as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus modify the subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the needs of the organism. \n\nIt is by such specific changes of organic activities in response to specific changes in the medium that the control of the environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is affected. Now all of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the words mental or intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities, and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action (volition) upon them.\n\n(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is not a refinement and perfecting achieved by \"exercise\" as one might strengthen a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which are specially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to say, among the reactions of the body in general that occur upon stimulation of the eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to reaching, grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated—or else no training occurs. As we have already noted, the primary reactions, with very few exceptions are too diffused and general to be practical of much use in the case of the human infant. Hence the identity of training with the selective response. (Compare p. 25.)\n\n (b) Equally important is the specific coordination of different factors of response which take place. There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which affect grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call out just these reactions and no others, and an establishment of a connection between the two. But the coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature reactions may take place when the object is grasped. \n\nThese will also be brought in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with the optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed—as a bright flame, independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues. The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a certain sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies the activity, the response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected with auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the complex response.\n\n(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training. The usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the reaction, the less the skill acquired in practising and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behaviour. \n\nAccording to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his spelling lesson acquires, besides the ability to spell those particular words, an increase of power of observation, attention, and recollection which may be employed whenever these powers are needed. As matter of fact, the more he confines himself to noticing and fixating on the forms of words, irrespective of connection with other things (such as the meaning of the words, the context in which they are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say nothing of his ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. \n\nThe connections which are employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions) are deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is not available for perceiving and recalling other things. In ordinary phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context—that is to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated—the more the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any \"transfer,\" but because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a narrow and rigid, coordination.\n\n (4) Going to the root of the matter, the fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its separation of activities and capacities from the subject matter. There is no such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there is only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react upon circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigour or strength, but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use in connection with the material means that accomplish them. \n\nVigour will enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club, sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordination or as the same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the difference between the training of the ability to spell which comes from taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in connection with the activities required to grasp the meaning, such as context, affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to \"develop\" certain muscles, and a game or sport. \n\nThe former is uniform and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to be met; the coordination forming has to be kept flexible and elastic. Consequently, the training is much more \"general\"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and includes more factors. Exactly the same thing holds of special and general education of the mind.\n\nA monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be an authority in a particular field and yet of more than usual poor judgment in matters not closely allied unless the training in the special field has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields. \n\n(5) Consequently, such powers as observation, recollection, judgment, and esthetic taste, represent organized results of the occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject matters. A man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a button for the observing faculty to get to work (in other words by \"willing\" to observe); but if he has something to do which can be accomplished successfully only through intensive and extensive use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. Observation is an outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organs and subject matter. It will vary, accordingly, with the subject matter employed.\n\nIt is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating in another form what has already been said, to declare that the criterion here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and judge those things which make him an effective competent member of the group in which he is associated with others. Otherwise, we might as well set the pupil to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue—which is about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal discipline. If the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer are better habits than those which are thus formed, it is because they deal with subject matter which is more significant in life. \n\nIn concluding this portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction between special and general education has nothing to do with the transferability of function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer is miraculous and impossible. But some activities are broad; they involve the coordination of many factors. Their development demands continuous alternation and readjustment. As conditions change, certain factors are subordinated, and others which had been of minor importance come to the front. \n\nThere is constant redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by a series of uniform motions. Thus there is a practice in the prompt making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to meet a change in the subject matter. Wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development, general education is bound to result. This is what \"general\" means; broad and flexible. In practice, education meets these conditions, and hence is general, in the degree in which it takes account of social relationships. \n\nA person may become an expert in technical philosophy, philology, mathematics or engineering or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action and judgment outside of his speciality. If however his concern with these technical subject matters has been connected with human activities having social breadth, the range of active responses called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider. Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief obstruction in current practice to securing a general training of the mind. Literature, art, and religion, when thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the technical things which the professional upholders of general education strenuously oppose.', 'Education is a Training of Faculties.', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13372-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 14:35:55', '2023-04-23 14:35:55', '', 13372, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13596', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13597, 1, '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '2023-04-23 14:35:56', ' We have laid it down that the educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every stage an added capacity for growth. This conception contrasts sharply with other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process of preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are not regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. \n\nThe conception is only carried a little further when the life of adults is considered as not having meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for \"another life.\" The idea is but another form of the notion of the negative and privative character of growth already criticized; hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil consequences which flow from putting education on this basis. In the first place, it involves a loss of impetus. Motive power is not utilized. Children proverbially live in the present; that is not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is excellence. The future just as the future lacks urgency and body. To get ready for something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek motive power in a vague chance. Under such circumstances, there is, in the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination. \n\nThe future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will intervene before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry about getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much increased because the present offers so many wonderful opportunities and proffers such invitations to adventure. Naturally, attention and energy go to them; <a href=\"/forums/forum/topic/learning-outcome-benchmarks-for-primary-education-in-lagos-state/\" title=\"Learning Outcome Benchmarks For Primary Education in Lagos State\">education accrues naturally as an outcome</a>, but a lesser education than if the full stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative as possible. A third undesirable result is the substitution of a conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for a standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual under instruction. For a severe and definite judgment based upon the strong and weak points of the individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion concerning what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more or less remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point to a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it thinks it is succeeding—in getting prepared for the future.\n\nFinally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The future has no stimulating and directing power when severed from the possibilities of the present, something must be hitched onto it to make it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is actually confronted. \n\nBut when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future, rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into taking something which they do not care for.\n\nIt is not of course a question of whether education should prepare for the future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments; it is a continuous leading factor into the future. If the environment, in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching importance to preparation for future needs, but in making it the mainspring of present effort. Because the need for preparation for a continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent on making the present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.', 'Education is a Preparation for the Life of the Children', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13370-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '', 13370, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13597', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13598, 1, '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally employed) that it would hardly be worthwhile to mention them if it were not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more important and permanent mode of control. This other method resides in the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated, use things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends. The very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives, moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of directing his activity.\n\nThis fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what is meant by the social environment. We are given to separate from each other in the physical and social environments in which we live. The separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which we have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in current psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact with a purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from the use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another. Comparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded as personal. The physical medium is reduced to a mere means of personal contact. In contrast with such direct modes of mutual influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the use of things as means and as measures of results. Even if the mother never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her for not helping, the child would be subjected to the direction in her activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the parent, in the household life. Imitation, emulation, and the need of working together enforce control.\n\nIf the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach the thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be taking. The way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child has watched the mother. When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.\n\nIn saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming disposition. We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the part played in the joint activity by the use of things. The philosophy of learning has been unduly dominated by false psychology. It is frequently <a href=\"/forums/forum/topic/learning-outcome-benchmarks-for-primary-education-in-lagos-state/\" title=\"Learning Outcome Benchmarks For Primary Education in Lagos State\">stated that a person learns</a> by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having received a store of sensory impressions, association or some power of mental synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas—into things with a meaning. An object, stone, orange, tree, or chair, is supposed to convey different impressions of colour, shape, size, hardness, smell, taste, etc., which aggregated together constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing. But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which supply the meaning with which it is identified. A chair is a thing which is put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another purpose; orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown in warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable odour and refreshing taste, etc.\n\nThe difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental act is that the latter involves a response to a thing in its meaning; the former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant the need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone and kick it to one side purely physically. I put it to one side for fear someone will stumble upon it, but intelligently; I respond to a meaning that the thing has. I am startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not—more likely if I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behaviour has a mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, and unintelligently.\n\nIn both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or controlled. But in the merely blind response, the direction is also blind. There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. We all have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware since they were formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently, they possess us, rather than them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become aware of what they accomplish and pass judgment upon the worth of the result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view—as having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to be \"brought up\" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the same ideas about things which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be really members of a social group, is, therefore, to attach the same meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise, there is no common understanding and no community life. But in a shared activity, each person refers to what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same inclusive situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity unless the pulling is done with the knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering what they are doing. A pin may pass in the course of its manufacture through the hands of many persons. But each may do his part without knowledge of what others do or without any reference to what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate result—his own pay.\nThere is, in this case, no common consequence to which the several acts are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse or association, in spite of juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact that their respective doings contribute to a single outcome. But if each views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their behaviour upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent in behaviour. There is an understanding set up between the different contributors; and this common understanding controls the action of each. Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one person automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person who caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted without knowing where the ball came from or went to. Clearly, such action would be without point or meaning. It might be physically controlled, but it would not be socially directed. But suppose that each becomes aware of what the other is doing, and becomes interested in the other\'s action and thereby interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of the other. The behaviour of each would then be intelligent; socially intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary kind. An infant is hungry and cries while food is prepared in his presence. If he does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor what they are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically controlled by his own organic state. But when he makes a back-and-forth reference his whole attitude changes. He takes an interest, as we say; he takes notes and watches what others are doing. He no longer reacts just to his own hunger but behaves in the light of what others are doing for their prospective satisfaction. In that way, he also no longer just gives way to hunger without knowing it, but he notes, recognizes, or identifies his own state. It becomes an object for him. His attitude toward it becomes to some degree intelligent. And in such noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his own state, he is socially directed.\n\nIt will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence the mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action for prospective consequences. The other point is persons modify one another\'s dispositions only through the unique use they make of physical conditions. Consider first the case of so-called expressive movements to which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of fists, and natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these are not expressive. They are organic parts of a person\'s attitude. One does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. But others use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of a person with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in which that person finds himself, and as an indication of what course to pursue. The frown signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty and hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing something to restore confidence. A man at some distance is waving his arms wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude of detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will be on the level of any remote physical change which we happen to note. If we have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless to us as the gyrations of the arms of a windmill. But if interest is aroused, we begin to participate. We refer to his action to something we are doing ourselves or that we should do. We have to judge the meaning of his act in order to decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us of an explosion to be set off, against which we should guard ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in the other case, to run away. In any case, it is the change he effects in the physical environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct ourselves. Our action is socially controlled because we endeavour to refer what we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting.\n\nLanguage is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation. Hence its unrivalled significance as a means of social direction. But language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, ploughs, horses, and money in certain ways. If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to use things in the same way or to use other things in a way which will fit in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in a never-ending stream of detail. The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control. When children go to school, they already have \"minds\"—they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use of language. But these \"minds\" are the organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously required by putting things to use in connection with the way other persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual. It is not \"moral\" in the sense that a person is moved by a direct personal appeal from others, important as is this method at critical junctures. It consists of the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and competition. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this sense is the method of social control.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13367-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '2023-04-23 14:35:56', '', 13367, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13598', 0, 'revision', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13599, 1, '2023-04-23 14:35:58', '2023-04-23 14:35:58', '<h3>1. The Environment as Directive.</h3>\r\nWe now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance. Of these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best conveys the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities of the individuals guided; control conveys rather the notion of an energy brought to bear from without and meeting some resistance from the one controlled; direction is a more neutral term and suggests the fact that the active tendencies of those directed are led in a certain continuous course, instead of dispersing aimlessly. Direction expresses the basic function, which tends at one extreme to become a guiding assistance and at another, a regulation or ruling.\r\n\r\nBut in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning sometimes read into the term \"control.\" It is sometimes assumed, explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual\'s tendencies are naturally purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus antisocial. Control then denotes the process by which he is brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of government and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and it has seriously affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no ground for any such view. Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community would be possible. And there would not even be any one interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony unless he thought that thereby he could gain some personal advantage. Control, in truth, means only an emphatic form of direction of powers, and covers the regulation gained by an individual through his own efforts quite as much as that brought about when others take the lead.\r\n\r\nIn general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put the other way around, a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were, against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it. There is an adaptation of the stimulus and response to each other. A light is the stimulus to the eye to see something, and the business of the eye is to see. If the eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an outside interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to do.\r\n\r\nThis general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects. In the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts, the stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not sufficiently definite to call out, in the beginning, specific responses. There is always a great deal of superfluous energy aroused. This energy may be wasted, going aside from the point; it may also go against the successful performance of an act. It does harm by getting in the way. Compare the behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that of the expert. There is little axis of direction in the energies put forth; they are largely dispersive and centrifugal. Direction involves a focusing and fixating of action in order that it may be truly a response, and this requires an elimination of unnecessary and confusing movements.\r\n\r\nIn the second place, although no activity can be produced in which the person does not cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which does not fit into the sequence and continuity of action. A person boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in such a way as to expose himself the next instant to a still harder blow. Adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.\r\n\r\nIn short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a given time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially called out, those be selected which center energy upon the point of need. Successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those which precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved. Focusing and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one spatial, the other temporal. The first insures hitting the mark; the second keeps the balance required for further action. Obviously, it is not possible to separate them in practice as we have distinguished them in idea. Activity must be centered at a given time in such a way as to prepare for what comes next. The problem of the immediate response is complicated by one\'s having to be on the lookout for future occurrences.\r\n\r\nTwo conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand, purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most only supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.\r\n\r\nWhile the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct as well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all, participate in the direction which their actions finally take. In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human nature. To take into account the contribution made by the existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them economically and wisely. Speaking accurately, all direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one\'s attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.\r\n\r\nOn the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations of others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish its immediate effect, but at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the person out of balance. A threat may, for example, prevent a person from doing something to which he is naturally inclined by arousing fear of disagreeable consequences if he persists. But he may be left in the position which exposes him later on to influences which will lead him to do even worse things. His instincts of cunning and slyness may be aroused, so that things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion and trickery more than would otherwise have been the case. Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct.\r\n\r\n2. Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most conscious of directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so to do. As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them to do. But the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention on our part.\r\n\r\n1. When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled. In such cases, our control becomes most direct, and at this point we are most likely to make the mistakes just spoken of. We are even likely to take the influence of superior force for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In all such cases of immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate between physical results and moral results. A person may be in such a condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is necessary for his own good. A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt. But no improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow.\r\n\r\nA harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping a child away from the fire, and the same desirable physical effect will follow as if he had been snatched away. But there may be no more obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other. A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons\' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person\'s own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way.\r\n\r\nIn general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In such a state, every act is alike to him. Whatever moves him does move him, and that is all there is to it.\r\n\r\nIn some cases, it is well to permit him to experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order that he may act intelligently next time under similar circumstances. But some courses of action are too discommoding and obnoxious to others to allow of this course being pursued. Direct disapproval is now resorted to. Shaming, ridicule, disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or contrary tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his troublesome line of behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation, his hope of winning favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action in another direction.\r\n\r\n2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it were not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more important and permanent mode of control. This other method resides in the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated, use things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends. The very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives, moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of directing his activity.\r\n\r\nThis fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what is meant by the social environment. We are given to separating from each other the physical and social environments in which we live. The separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which we have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in current psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact with a purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another.\r\n\r\nComparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded as personal. The physical medium is reduced to a mere means of personal contact. In contrast with such direct modes of mutual influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the use of things as means and as measures of results. Even if the mother never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her for not helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the parent, in the household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of working together, enforce control.\r\n\r\nIf the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach the thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be taking. The way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child has watched the mother. When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.\r\n\r\nIn saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming disposition. We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the part played in the joint activity by the use of things. The philosophy of learning has been unduly dominated by a false psychology. It is frequently <a href=\"/forums/forum/topic/learning-outcome-benchmarks-for-primary-education-in-lagos-state/\" title=\"Learning Outcome Benchmarks For Primary Education in Lagos State\">stated that a person learns</a> by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having received a store of sensory impressions, association or some power of mental synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas—into things with a meaning. An object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to convey different impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell, taste, etc., which aggregated together constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing. But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the meaning with which it is identified. A chair is a thing which is put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown in warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable odor and refreshing taste, etc.\r\n\r\nThe difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning; the former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side purely physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it, intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not—more likely, if I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behavior has a mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.\r\n\r\nIn both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also blind. There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view—as having a certain meaning.\r\n\r\nAnd not till he knew what he was about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to be \"brought up\" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the same ideas about things which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise, there is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same inclusive situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering what they are doing.\r\n\r\nA pin may pass in the course of its manufacture through the hands of many persons. But each may do his part without knowledge of what others do or without any reference to what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate result—his own pay. There is, in this case, no common consequence to which the several acts are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse or association, in spite of juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact that their respective doings contribute to a single outcome. But if each views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent in behavior. There is an understanding set up between the different contributors; and this common understanding controls the action of each.\r\n\r\nSuppose that conditions were so arranged that one person automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person who caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted without knowing where the ball came from or went to. Clearly, such action would be without point or meaning. It might be physically controlled, but it would not be socially directed. But suppose that each becomes aware of what the other is doing, and becomes interested in the other\'s action and thereby interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of the other. The behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary kind. An infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his presence. If he does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor what they are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically controlled by his own organic state.\r\n\r\nBut when he makes a back and forth reference, his whole attitude changes. He takes an interest, as we say; he takes note and watches what others are doing. He no longer reacts just to his own hunger, but behaves in the light of what others are doing for its prospective satisfaction. In that way, he also no longer just gives way to hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or identifies his own state. It becomes an object for him. His attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent. And in such noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his own state, he is socially directed.\r\n\r\nIt will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action for prospective consequences. The other point is persons modify one another\'s dispositions only through the special use they make of physical conditions. Consider first the case of so-called expressive movements to which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of fists, natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these are not expressive. They are organic parts of a person\'s attitude.\r\n\r\nOne does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. But others use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of a person with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in which that person finds himself, and as an indication of what course to pursue. The frown signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty and hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing something to restore confidence. A man at some distance is waving his arms wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude of detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will be on the level of any remote physical change which we happen to note. If we have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless to us as the gyrations of the arms of a windmill. But if interest is aroused, we begin to participate.\r\n\r\nWe refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or that we should do. We have to judge the meaning of his act in order to decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us of an explosion to be set off, against which we should guard ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in the other case, to run away. In any case, it is the change he effects in the physical environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct ourselves. Our action is socially controlled because we endeavor to refer what we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting.\r\n\r\nLanguage is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation. Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. But language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in certain ways. If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to use things in the same way, or to use other things in a way which will fit in.\r\n\r\nIf a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control. When children go to school, they already have \"minds\"—they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use of language. But these \"minds\" are the organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously required by putting things to use in connection with the way other persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual.\r\n\r\nIt is not \"moral\" in the sense that a person is moved by direct personal appeal from others, important as is this method at critical junctures. It consists in the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and competition. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this sense is the method of social control.\r\n\r\n3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of a psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as it were, in contact with physical objects, and which believes that knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only comparatively recently has the predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. Even now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons. The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and impossible separation between persons and things. Interaction with things may form habits of external adjustment.\r\n\r\nBut it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious intent only when things are used to produce a result. And the only way one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to physical objects. In substance, this so-called social psychology has been built upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation of mental disposition.\r\n\r\nAccording to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. According to our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for partaking with others in a use of things which leads to consequences of common interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for the cause of the effect.\r\n\r\nThere can be no doubt that individuals in forming a social group are like-minded; they understand one another. They tend to act with the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given similar circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to be engaged in \"imitating\" one another. In the sense that they are doing much the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough. But \"imitation\" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats the fact as an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power.\r\n\r\nObjective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This social fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced the likeness. A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli. Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry and attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing the undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in different ways in groups having different customs. In one group, it may be met by recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, in a third by an exhibition of contemptuous disregard.\r\n\r\nThis happens, so it is said, because the model set for imitation is different. But there is no need to appeal to imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means that the actual stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious instruction plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence. Still more effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the way current in his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate with others on intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave. The pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way is unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation is mainly the product of conscious instruction and of the selective influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and ratifications of those with whom one associates.\r\n\r\nSuppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the situation—the game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling the ball back; it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and return it,—that the game may continue. The \"pattern\" or model is not the action of the other person. The whole situation requires that each should adapt his action in view of what the other person has done and is to do. Imitation may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has an interest on his own account; he wants to keep it going. He may then note how the other person catches and holds the ball in order to improve his own acts. He imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be done. And he imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his own initiative, to take an effective part in the game.\r\n\r\nOne has only to consider how completely the child is dependent from his earliest days for successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his acts into those of others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as others behave, and of developing an understanding of them in order that he may so behave. The pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation. As matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory affair which leaves little effect upon disposition.\r\n\r\nIdiots are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts but not the meaning of their performance. When we find children engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we would do if it were an important means of social control) we are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats. Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent act. It involves close observation, and judicious selection of what will enable one to do better something which he already is trying to do. Used for a purpose, the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a factor in the development of effective action.\r\n\r\nThis excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts which enables one to participate effectively in associated activities. Only the friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads to the view that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to natural inclinations. Only failure to take account of the situations in which persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in promoting social control.\r\n\r\n4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first answer to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful study has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native differences are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture. In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind.\r\n\r\nLack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends. We start not so much with superior capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural conditions. As they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors.\r\n\r\nEvery domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and favoring conditions. Because the activities of children today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which have preceded.\r\n\r\nStimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our system of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat, light, and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization, and without the things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing a precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed. A body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the positive resources of civilization.\r\n\r\nIf Greece, with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because Greece operated for social ends such resources as it had. But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control of physical forces, or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation of mental and moral disposition.\r\n\r\nIntentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life—physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools—it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In countless ways, language condenses meanings that record social outcomes and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in what is worth while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become almost synonymous.\r\n\r\nThe emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its dangers—dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice. Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of \"telling\" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.\r\n\r\nBut its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of instruction and administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations with things. Not that the use of language as an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities. \"These things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others undone.\" And for the school \"these things\" mean equipment with the instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.\r\n\r\nFor when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim.\r\n\r\nWe may secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which things have in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in a joint activity, where one person\'s use of material and tools is consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained.\r\n<h2>Summary - Education as Direction</h2>\r\nThe natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born. Consequently they have to be directed or guided. This control is not the same thing as physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting at any one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of continuity into the sequence of acts. The action of others is always influenced by deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But in some cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals, the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to influencing action. Since in such cases we are most conscious of controlling the action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the importance of this sort of control at the expense of a more permanent and effective method.\r\n\r\nThe basic control resides in the nature of the situations in which the young take part. In social situations the young have to refer their way of acting to what others are doing and make it fit in. This directs their action to a common result, and gives an understanding common to the participants. For all mean the same thing, even when performing different acts. This common understanding of the means and ends of action is the essence of social control. It is indirect, or emotional and intellectual, not direct or personal. Moreover it is intrinsic to the disposition of the person, not external and coercive. To achieve this internal control through identity of interest and understanding is the business of education. While books and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. Schools require for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used.', 'Education as Direction', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13148-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 14:35:58', '2023-04-23 14:35:58', '', 13148, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13599', 0, 'revision', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13600, 1, '2023-04-23 14:35:59', '2023-04-23 14:35:59', 'In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there is perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for a dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In whatever sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of the nation\'s probabilities of advance in all ideal directions.\r\n\r\nThe outward organization of <a href=\"/forums/forum/topic/learning-outcome-benchmarks-for-primary-education-in-lagos-state/\" title=\"Learning Outcome Benchmarks For Primary Education in Lagos State\">education which we have in our United States</a> is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to entail),—all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn.\r\n\r\nHaving so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an accomplished fact.\r\n\r\nNo one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their aspiration toward the \'professional\' spirit in their work, have led them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am sure, for information concerning the mind\'s operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside.\r\n\r\nFar be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a \'boom\' in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day.\r\n\r\nSome of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. \'The new psychology\' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystification laid upon the teachers of our day. The matter of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you teachers in the earlier grades have any defect—the slightest touch of a defect in the world—it is that you are a mite too docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a license to lay down the law to them from above.\r\n\r\nAs regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at once that in my humble opinion there <i>is</i> no \'new psychology\' worthy of the name. There is nothing but the old psychology which began in Locke\'s time, plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements of introspective detail, for the most part without adaptation to the teacher\'s use. It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher; and they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new.—I trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the end of all these talks.\r\n\r\nI say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind\'s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.\r\n\r\nThe science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress the lines.\r\n\r\nThe art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the teaching must <i>agree</i> with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychological laws.\r\n\r\nTo know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher\'s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.\r\n\r\nThe science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all you have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.\r\n\r\nThe principles being so plain, there would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard things for the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the only helpers here.\r\n\r\nBut, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles,—to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with all our concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine. Such a complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim.\r\n\r\nFortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And, as the most general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great. Those who find themselves loving the subject may go as far as they please, and become possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, even though in some of them one might apprehend a little loss of balance from the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written on the palm of one\'s hand.\r\n\r\nLeast of all need you, merely <i>as teachers</i>, deem it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible manner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child-study have thrown a certain burden on you in this way. By all means let child-study go on,—it is refreshing all our sense of the child\'s life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling statistics, and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly enrich their lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us more intimately with our pupils.\r\n\r\nThe American educational organization,—What teachers may expect from psychology,—Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,—The science of teaching and the science of war,—The educational uses of psychology defined,—The teacher\'s duty toward child-study. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as noted in the children,—processes of which we might otherwise have remained inobservant. But, for Heaven\'s sake, let the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to contribute to the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it be preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom it proves an exterminating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree with my colleague, Professor Münsterberg, when he says that the teacher\'s attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is positively opposed to the psychological observer\'s, which is abstract and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes successfully, in most of us they must conflict.\r\n\r\nThe worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe of education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden; yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well, have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent pedagogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing word from me might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic mystification of which I have already complained. The best teacher may be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than this.\r\n\r\nSo much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention.', 'PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13152-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 14:35:59', '2023-04-23 14:35:59', '', 13152, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13600', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13601, 16, '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '<span style=\"color: #000000;font-family: \'Times New Roman\';font-size: medium;text-align: justify;text-indent: 16px;background-color: #faebd0\">For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education as it operates in different types of community life. To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes but which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs? To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life.</span>', 'The Democratic Conception in Education', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-democratic-conception-in-education', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '', 13250, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13602, 16, '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '<span style=\"color: #000000;font-family: \'Times New Roman\';font-size: medium;text-align: justify;text-indent: 16px;background-color: #faebd0\">For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education as it operates in different types of community life. To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes but which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs? To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life.</span>', 'The Democratic Conception in Education', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13601-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '2023-04-23 17:06:22', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13602', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13603, 16, '2023-04-23 17:10:27', '2023-04-23 17:10:27', '1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned with a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. Within every larger social organization, there are numerous minor groups: not only political subdivisions but industrial, scientific, and religious, associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern states and in some ancient, there is a great diversity of populations, of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p. 20.)\n\nThe terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a eulogistic or normative sense and a descriptive sense; a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity, the praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, and mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts that the term denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it, and political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then made so \"ideal\" as to be of no use, having no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of \"Society\" which hold it together. There is honour among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest with respect to its members. Gangs are marked by fraternal feelings, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the socialization depend upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest an improvement. Now in any social group, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits, we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, and aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth the experience of other members—it is readily communicable—and that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in return receives support from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association.', 'The Implications of Human Association', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-implications-of-human-association', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:00', '2023-04-23 17:56:00', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13603/', 1, 'reply', '', 0),
(13604, 16, '2023-04-23 17:10:27', '2023-04-23 17:10:27', '1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned with a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. Within every larger social organization, there are numerous minor groups: not only political subdivisions but industrial, scientific, and religious, associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern states and in some ancient, there is a great diversity of populations, of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p. 20.)\n\nThe terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a eulogistic or normative sense and a descriptive sense; a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity, the praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, and mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts that the term denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it, and political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then made so \"ideal\" as to be of no use, having no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of \"Society\" which hold it together. There is honour among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest with respect to its members. Gangs are marked by fraternal feelings, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the socialization depend upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest an improvement. Now in any social group, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits, we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, and aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth the experience of other members—it is readily communicable—and that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in return receives support from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association.', 'The Implications of Human Association', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13603-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:10:27', '2023-04-23 17:10:27', '', 13603, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13604', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13605, 16, '2023-04-23 17:19:07', '2023-04-23 17:19:07', 'I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects and must call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of coercive force. It may be said, however, that the activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading—that such a government calls into functioning activity simply the capacity for fear. In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. Caution, circumspection, prudence, and desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of specific tangible reward—say comfort and ease—many other capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account, they are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.\n\nThis is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses meaning when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject class prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.\n\nLack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means a challenge to thought. The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines—as it is when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences—the more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is said about the scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which restricts the science which secures the efficiency of operation to movements of the muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the relations of a man to his work—including his relations to others who take part—which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is doing. Efficiency in production often demands the division of labour. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as the efficiency of activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry—those who supply its aims. Because of their lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not a sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in the industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with the technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the failure to take into account the significant social factors means nonetheless an absence of mind and a corresponding distortion of emotional life. II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique bring its antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests \"of its own\" which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion reconstruction. It is commonplace that an alert and expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it—the sphere of social contacts. Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate the distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring people and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of space.', 'Applying the First Element in this Criterion to a Despotically Governed State', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'applying-the-first-element-in-this-criterion-to-a-despotically-governed-state', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:55:58', '2023-04-23 17:55:58', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13605/', 2, 'reply', '', 0),
(13606, 16, '2023-04-23 17:19:08', '2023-04-23 17:19:08', 'I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects and must call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of coercive force. It may be said, however, that the activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading—that such a government calls into functioning activity simply the capacity for fear. In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. Caution, circumspection, prudence, and desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of specific tangible reward—say comfort and ease—many other capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account, they are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.\n\nThis is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses meaning when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject class prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.\n\nLack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means a challenge to thought. The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines—as it is when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences—the more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is said about the scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which restricts the science which secures the efficiency of operation to movements of the muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the relations of a man to his work—including his relations to others who take part—which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is doing. Efficiency in production often demands the division of labour. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as the efficiency of activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry—those who supply its aims. Because of their lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not a sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in the industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with the technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the failure to take into account the significant social factors means nonetheless an absence of mind and a corresponding distortion of emotional life. II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique bring its antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests \"of its own\" which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion reconstruction. It is commonplace that an alert and expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it—the sphere of social contacts. Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate the distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring people and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of space.', 'Applying the First Element in this Criterion to a Despotically Governed State', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13605-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:19:08', '2023-04-23 17:19:08', '', 13605, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13606', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13607, 16, '2023-04-23 17:22:43', '2023-04-23 17:22:43', '2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change in social habit—its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.\n\nUpon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, make a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the invitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.\n\nThe widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. But after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously, a society to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal must see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A society marked off into classes needs he especially attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.', 'The Democratic Ideal.', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-democratic-ideal', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:55:57', '2023-04-23 17:55:57', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13607/', 3, 'reply', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13608, 16, '2023-04-23 17:22:43', '2023-04-23 17:22:43', '2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change in social habit—its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.\n\nUpon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, make a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the invitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.\n\nThe widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. But after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously, a society to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal must see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A society marked off into classes needs he especially attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.', 'The Democratic Ideal.', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13607-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:22:43', '2023-04-23 17:22:43', '', 13607, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13608', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13609, 16, '2023-04-23 17:27:13', '2023-04-23 17:27:13', '3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be devoted to making explicit the implications of democratic ideas in education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have evolved in three epochs when the social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one to be considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use. Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and a social group. Consequently, he limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements. Plato\'s starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities—what he called justice—as a trait of both individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is not possible to save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized and factional society sets up a number of different models and standards. Under such conditions, it is impossible for the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a complete whole is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims inevitably leads thought astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom—or truth—may by study learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.\n\nIt would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.\n\nWhile he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in the society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him, they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that. Consequently, the testing and sifting function of education only shows to which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and combinations of which an individual is capable. There were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual\'s constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and progress.\n\nIn some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to the labouring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are capable of the highest kind of education and become in time the legislators of the state—for laws are the universals which control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality. We cannot better Plato\'s conviction that an individual is happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those activities for which he has natural equipment, nor his conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato\'s lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was nonetheless in bondage to static ideals. He thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be inherently important, if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state, he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with the possession of ruling power in the state.', 'The Platonic Educational Philosophy', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-platonic-educational-philosophy', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:55:56', '2023-04-23 17:55:56', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13609/', 4, 'reply', '', 0),
(13610, 16, '2023-04-23 17:27:13', '2023-04-23 17:27:13', '3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be devoted to making explicit the implications of democratic ideas in education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have evolved in three epochs when the social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one to be considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use. Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and a social group. Consequently, he limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements. Plato\'s starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities—what he called justice—as a trait of both individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is not possible to save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized and factional society sets up a number of different models and standards. Under such conditions, it is impossible for the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a complete whole is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims inevitably leads thought astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom—or truth—may by study learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.\n\nIt would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.\n\nWhile he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in the society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him, they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that. Consequently, the testing and sifting function of education only shows to which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and combinations of which an individual is capable. There were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual\'s constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and progress.\n\nIn some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to the labouring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are capable of the highest kind of education and become in time the legislators of the state—for laws are the universals which control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality. We cannot better Plato\'s conviction that an individual is happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those activities for which he has natural equipment, nor his conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato\'s lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was nonetheless in bondage to static ideals. He thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be inherently important, if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state, he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with the possession of ruling power in the state.', 'The Platonic Educational Philosophy', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13609-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:27:13', '2023-04-23 17:27:13', '', 13609, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13610', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13611, 16, '2023-04-23 17:30:44', '2023-04-23 17:30:44', '4. The \"Individualistic\" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In eighteenth-century philosophy, we find ourselves in a very different circle of ideas. \"Nature\" still means something antithetical to the existing social organization; Plato greatly influenced Rousseau. But the voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of the free development of individuality in all its variety. Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might secure a greater amount of private happiness for themselves. Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance of the movement. In reality, its chief interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society—toward cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity. In membership in humanity, as distinct from a state, man\'s capacities would be liberated; while in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society.\n\nThe heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. A such limitation was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned devotion to the emancipation of life from external restrictions which operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in the worship of nature. To give \"nature\" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt, and inequitable social order with a new and better kingdom of humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a working power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force balanced with every other. Natural law would accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.\n\nEducation in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains was emancipating them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions were too false and corrupt to be entrusted with this work. How could it be expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own destruction? \"Nature\" must then be the power to which the enterprise was to be left. Even the extremely sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was currently derived itself from this conception. To insist that mind is originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there would be no limits to the possibility of education by means of the natural environment. And since the natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious \"truth,\" this education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.', 'The \"Individualistic\" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-individualistic-ideal-of-the-eighteenth-century', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:55:54', '2023-04-23 17:55:54', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13611/', 5, 'reply', '', 0),
(13612, 16, '2023-04-23 17:30:44', '2023-04-23 17:30:44', '4. The \"Individualistic\" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In eighteenth-century philosophy, we find ourselves in a very different circle of ideas. \"Nature\" still means something antithetical to the existing social organization; Plato greatly influenced Rousseau. But the voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of the free development of individuality in all its variety. Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might secure a greater amount of private happiness for themselves. Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance of the movement. In reality, its chief interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society—toward cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity. In membership in humanity, as distinct from a state, man\'s capacities would be liberated; while in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society.\n\nThe heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. A such limitation was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned devotion to the emancipation of life from external restrictions which operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in the worship of nature. To give \"nature\" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt, and inequitable social order with a new and better kingdom of humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a working power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force balanced with every other. Natural law would accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.\n\nEducation in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains was emancipating them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions were too false and corrupt to be entrusted with this work. How could it be expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own destruction? \"Nature\" must then be the power to which the enterprise was to be left. Even the extremely sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was currently derived itself from this conception. To insist that mind is originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there would be no limits to the possibility of education by means of the natural environment. And since the natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious \"truth,\" this education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.', 'The \"Individualistic\" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13611-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:30:44', '2023-04-23 17:30:44', '', 13611, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13612', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13613, 16, '2023-04-23 17:36:15', '2023-04-23 17:36:15', '5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory on the constructive side became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the instruction process. The \"complete and harmonious development of all powers,\" having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive humanity, required definite organization for its realization. Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the support of the state. The realization of the new education destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the activities of existing states. The movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered schools.\n\nSo far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement in political life—a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular, education became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The \"state\" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form the citizen, not the \"man,\" became the aim of education. 1 The historical situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt (and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen, they made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public education.\n\nThis change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory. The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system, from the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and political defence and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defence and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since, however, the idea of culture as the complete development of personality persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the \"organic\" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to be his subordination to political authority and the demand for the sacrifice of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective reason manifested in the state—the only way in which he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing \"disciplinary\" subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by which man becomes a man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature—not as Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity. But there is great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes.\n\nWho, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity. \"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them. Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are simply interested in such training as will make their subjects better tools for their own intentions.\" Even the subsidy by rulers of privately conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. The rulers\' interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in this view an express statement of the points characteristic of eighteenth-century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full development of private personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea of progress. In addition, we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time, Kant\'s philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular, the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and social coherency and stability. His situation forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The eighteenth-century educational philosophy was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include humanity and provide for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth century endeavoured again to equate the ideals of free and complete development of cultured personality with social discipline and political subordination. It made the national state an intermediary between the realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of \"harmonious development of all the powers of personality\" or in the more recent terminology of \"social efficiency.\" All this reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and \"humanitarian\" conception suffered both from vagueness and from a lack of definite organs of execution and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental states particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for human welfare and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.\n\nThis confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and method. They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the people inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war with its neighbours. Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as a matter of course that each has interests which are exclusively it\'s own. To question this is to question the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice and political science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning of \"social\" as a function and test of education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as well in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers. The accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate administrative provision of school facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education. The same principle has an application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another. It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would stimulate international jealousy and hatred. The emphasis must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty with respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition of mind. If these applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims. Otherwise, a democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently applied.', 'Education as National and as Social', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'education-as-national-and-as-social', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:55:53', '2023-04-23 17:55:53', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13613/', 6, 'reply', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13614, 16, '2023-04-23 17:36:16', '2023-04-23 17:36:16', '5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory on the constructive side became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the instruction process. The \"complete and harmonious development of all powers,\" having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive humanity, required definite organization for its realization. Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the support of the state. The realization of the new education destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the activities of existing states. The movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered schools.\n\nSo far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement in political life—a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular, education became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The \"state\" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form the citizen, not the \"man,\" became the aim of education. 1 The historical situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt (and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen, they made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public education.\n\nThis change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory. The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system, from the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and political defence and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defence and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since, however, the idea of culture as the complete development of personality persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the \"organic\" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to be his subordination to political authority and the demand for the sacrifice of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective reason manifested in the state—the only way in which he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing \"disciplinary\" subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by which man becomes a man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature—not as Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity. But there is great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes.\n\nWho, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity. \"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them. Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are simply interested in such training as will make their subjects better tools for their own intentions.\" Even the subsidy by rulers of privately conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. The rulers\' interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in this view an express statement of the points characteristic of eighteenth-century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full development of private personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea of progress. In addition, we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time, Kant\'s philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular, the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and social coherency and stability. His situation forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The eighteenth-century educational philosophy was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include humanity and provide for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth century endeavoured again to equate the ideals of free and complete development of cultured personality with social discipline and political subordination. It made the national state an intermediary between the realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of \"harmonious development of all the powers of personality\" or in the more recent terminology of \"social efficiency.\" All this reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and \"humanitarian\" conception suffered both from vagueness and from a lack of definite organs of execution and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental states particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for human welfare and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.\n\nThis confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and method. They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the people inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war with its neighbours. Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as a matter of course that each has interests which are exclusively it\'s own. To question this is to question the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice and political science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning of \"social\" as a function and test of education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as well in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers. The accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate administrative provision of school facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education. The same principle has an application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another. It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would stimulate international jealousy and hatred. The emphasis must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty with respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition of mind. If these applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims. Otherwise, a democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently applied.', 'Education as National and as Social', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13613-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:36:16', '2023-04-23 17:36:16', '', 13613, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13614', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13615, 16, '2023-04-23 17:42:31', '2023-04-23 17:42:31', 'Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected that are used to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society, in other words, internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes provision for participation in the good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment involved the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the nation state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much-neglected strain in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own endeavour, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.', 'Summary: The Democratic Conception in Education', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'summary-the-democratic-conception-in-education', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:55:51', '2023-04-23 17:55:51', '', 13601, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/the-democratic-conception-in-education/reply/13615/', 7, 'reply', '', 0),
(13616, 16, '2023-04-23 17:42:31', '2023-04-23 17:42:31', 'Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected that are used to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society, in other words, internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes provision for participation in the good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment involved the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the nation state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much-neglected strain in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own endeavour, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.', 'Summary: The Democratic Conception in Education', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13615-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:42:31', '2023-04-23 17:42:31', '', 13615, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13616', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13617, 1, '2023-04-23 17:54:01', '2023-04-23 17:54:01', '<div class=\"post_column_1\" style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;width: 139.375px;float: left;padding-right: 24.2344px\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px\">DFID/UK Universities\nOnline Masters Degree</p>\n\n</div>\n<div class=\"post_column_1\" style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;width: 139.375px;float: left;padding-right: 0px\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px\"><strong>Deadline:</strong> 28 March 2023 (annual)\nStudy in: any Country\nCourse starts September 2023</p>\n\n</div>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px\"></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px\"></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Brief description: </strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships are for candidates from least developed and lower middle income Commonwealth countries, for part-time Master’s study by distance learning on selected courses offered by UK universities.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Host Institution(s) and Online Courses offered:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">See the list of <a style=\"color: #003366;background: transparent\" href=\"https://cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/commonwealth-distance-learning-scholarships-eligible-courses/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">eligible distance learning Master’s courses offered by participating UK institutions for 2023</a></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Number of Scholarships:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Not specified.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Target group:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Nationals of Commonwealth Developing Countries:</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Bangladesh, Belize, Cameroon, Eswatini, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, The Gambia, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Scholarship value/inclusions:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">A Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship covers tuition fees and study grants where required.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Eligibility:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px\">To apply for the scholarship, you must:</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px;text-align: justify\">• Be a citizen of or have been granted refugee status by an eligible Commonwealth country, or be a British Protected Person</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px;text-align: justify\">• Be permanently resident in a developing Commonwealth country</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px;text-align: justify\">• Hold a first degree of at least upper second class (2:1) standard. A lower qualification and sufficient relevant experience may be considered in certain cases</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px\">• Be unable to afford to study the programme without this scholarship</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Application instructions:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Candidates must apply and secure admission to study an approved Master’s course at a participating UK university in addition to applying for a Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship. <strong>You must check with your chosen university for their specific advice on when to apply, admission requirements, and rules for applying.</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">To apply for the Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship, you must make your application using the CSC’s Electronic Application System (EAS), in addition to any other application that you are required to complete by your chosen university. All applications must be submitted by 16:00 (GMT) on <strong>28 March 2023 </strong>at the latest.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">It is important to visit the official website (link found below) for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship. All enquiries about these scholarships should be directed to the university to which you wish to apply.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Website:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px\">Official Scholarship Website: <a style=\"color: #003366;background: transparent\" href=\"https://cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/scholarships/commonwealth-distance-learning-scholarships-candidates-2022/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https://cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/scholarships/commonwealth-distance-learning-scholarships-candidates-2022/</a></p>', 'Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships for Developing Commonwealth Countrie', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13503-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:54:01', '2023-04-23 17:54:01', '', 13503, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13617', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13618, 1, '2023-04-23 17:54:03', '2023-04-23 17:54:03', '<div class=\"post_column_1\" style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;width: 139.375px;float: left;padding-right: 24.2344px\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px\">DFID/UK Universities\nOnline Masters Degree</p>\n\n</div>\n<div class=\"post_column_1\" style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;width: 139.375px;float: left;padding-right: 0px\">\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px\"><strong>Deadline:</strong> 28 March 2023 (annual)\nStudy in: any Country\nCourse starts September 2023</p>\n\n</div>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px\"></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Brief description: </strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships are for candidates from least developed and lower middle income Commonwealth countries, for part-time Master’s study by distance learning on selected courses offered by UK universities.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Host Institution(s) and Online Courses offered:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">See the list of <a style=\"color: #003366;background: transparent\" href=\"https://cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/commonwealth-distance-learning-scholarships-eligible-courses/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">eligible distance learning Master’s courses offered by participating UK institutions for 2023</a></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Number of Scholarships:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Not specified.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Target group:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Nationals of Commonwealth Developing Countries:</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Bangladesh, Belize, Cameroon, Eswatini, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, The Gambia, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Scholarship value/inclusions:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">A Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship covers tuition fees and study grants where required.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Eligibility:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px\">To apply for the scholarship, you must:</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px;text-align: justify\">• Be a citizen of or have been granted refugee status by an eligible Commonwealth country, or be a British Protected Person</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px;text-align: justify\">• Be permanently resident in a developing Commonwealth country</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px;text-align: justify\">• Hold a first degree of at least upper second class (2:1) standard. A lower qualification and sufficient relevant experience may be considered in certain cases</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 60px\">• Be unable to afford to study the programme without this scholarship</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Application instructions:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">Candidates must apply and secure admission to study an approved Master’s course at a participating UK university in addition to applying for a Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship. <strong>You must check with your chosen university for their specific advice on when to apply, admission requirements, and rules for applying.</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">To apply for the Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship, you must make your application using the CSC’s Electronic Application System (EAS), in addition to any other application that you are required to complete by your chosen university. All applications must be submitted by 16:00 (GMT) on <strong>28 March 2023 </strong>at the latest.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px;text-align: justify\">It is important to visit the official website (link found below) for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship. All enquiries about these scholarships should be directed to the university to which you wish to apply.</p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;color: #003366\"><strong>Website:</strong></p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0px;margin-bottom: 10px;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 13.3333px;padding-left: 30px\">Official Scholarship Website: <a style=\"color: #003366;background: transparent\" href=\"https://cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/scholarships/commonwealth-distance-learning-scholarships-candidates-2022/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https://cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/scholarships/commonwealth-distance-learning-scholarships-candidates-2022/</a></p>', 'Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships for Developing Commonwealth Countrie', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13504-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:54:03', '2023-04-23 17:54:03', '', 13504, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13618', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13619, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:00', '2023-04-23 17:56:00', 'It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification, we have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive communities. \n\nThey endeavour to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency for improving society, from realizing that it represents not only the development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents.\n\nEducation may be conceived either retrospectively or\nprospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as a process of accommodating the future to the past, or as utilization of the past for a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards and patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a group of contents resulting from having certain things presented. In this case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which the later is to be assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to regard them as of little account. \n\nBut these experiences do not consist of externally presented material, but of the interaction of native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both the activities and the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory of formation through presentations consists in slighting this constant interaction and change. The same principle of criticism applies to theories which find the primary subject matter of study in the cultural products—especially the literary products—of man\'s history. \n\nIsolated from their connection with the present environment in which individuals have to act, they become a kind of rival and distracting environment. Their value lies in their use to increase the meaning of the things with which we have activities to do at the present time. The idea of education advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as external formation, and as a recapitulation of the past.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13444-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:00', '2023-04-23 17:56:00', '', 13444, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13619', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13620, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:02', '2023-04-23 17:56:02', '(2) The other side of an educative experience is the added power of subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is about, or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he can better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one in which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a capricious activity on the other. \n\n(a) In the latter one \"does not care what happens\"; one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of one\'s act (the evidence of its connections with other things) with the act. It is customary to frown upon the such aimless random activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness. But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the youth\'s own disposition, isolated from everything else. But in fact, such activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously whenever they act under external dictation, or from being told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed upon other acts. \n\nOne may learn by doing something which he does not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do much that we do not mean because the largest portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend is not perceived or anticipated. But we learn only because after the act is performed we note results which we had not noted before. But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the result—say the answer—and the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious and leads to capricious habits. \n\n(b) Routine action, an action which is automatic, may increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be said to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the meaning horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of acting has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced connection with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some critical moment. The vaunted \"skill\" turns out gross ineptitude.\n\nThe essential contrast of the idea of education as the continuous reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory, but only verbally. It means that experience as an active process occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion; it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward the things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous experience or activity is educative, and all education resides in having such experiences.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13443-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:02', '2023-04-23 17:56:02', '', 13443, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13620', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13621, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:05', '2023-04-23 17:56:05', 'In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embryonic growth of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of past stages. If there were any strict \"law\" of repetition, evolutionary development would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation would simply have repeated its predecessors\' existence. Development, in short, has taken place through the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. \n\nThe great advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. The business of education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The social environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. \n\nTo ignore the directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational function. A biologist has said: \"The history of development in different animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more direct method.\" Surely it would be foolish if education did not deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious experience so that they become increasingly successful.\n\nThe two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled from association with the false context which perverts them. On the biological side, we have simply the fact that any infant starts with precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. \n\nThe other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they represent the results of prior experience, their value for future experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Pieces of literature produced in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and use of them, a part of the present environment of individuals; but there is an enormous difference between availing ourselves of them as present resources and taking them as standards and patterns in their retrospective character.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13441-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:05', '2023-04-23 17:56:05', '', 13441, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13621', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13622, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:06', '2023-04-23 17:56:06', 'Herbart\'s great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the region of routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of conscious method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim and procedure, instead of being a compound of casual inspiration and subservience to tradition. \n\nMoreover, everything in teaching and discipline could be specified, instead of our having to be content with vague and more or less mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and speculative spiritual symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made faculties, which might be trained by exercise upon any sort of material, and made attention to the concrete subject matter, to the content, all-important. \n\nHerbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence in bringing to the front questions connected with the material of study than any other educational philosopher. He stated problems of method from the standpoint of their connection with subject matter: method having to do with the manner and sequence of presenting the new subject matter to insure its proper interaction with the old.\n\nThe fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster coming to his own. This fact expresses at once its strength and its weakness. \n\nThe conception that the mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists in its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue\'s view of life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning. It emphasizes the influence of the intellectual environment upon the mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves personal sharing in common experiences. \n\nIt exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of consciously formulated and used methods and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious, attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything educational into account save its essence,—a vital energy-seeking opportunity for effective exercise. \n\nAll education forms character, mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes place through them. It is a process of reconstruction and reorganization.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13439-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:06', '2023-04-23 17:56:06', '', 13439, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13622', 0, 'revision', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13623, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:08', '2023-04-23 17:56:08', 'The concrete character of the mind consists, then, wholly of the various arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different qualities. The \"furniture\" of the mind is the mind. Mind is wholly a matter of \"contents.\" The educational implications of this doctrine are threefold.\n\n(1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which evoke this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that arrangement among the reactions called out. The formation of the mind is wholly a matter of the presentation of the proper educational materials.\n\n(2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the \"apperceiving organs\" which control the assimilation of new presentations, their character is all important. The effect of new presentations is to reinforce groupings previously formed. The business of the educator is, first, to select the proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and, secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal.\n\n(3) Certain formal steps of all methods in teaching may be laid down. Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing, but since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is the step of \"preparation,\"—that is, calling into special activity and getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of the newly formed content to the performance of some task. Everything must go through this course; consequently, there is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13438-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:08', '2023-04-23 17:56:08', '', 13438, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13623', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13624, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:09', '2023-04-23 17:56:09', 'The conception that the result of the educative process is capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully directed—namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present. Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose. The notion that education is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the conception of growth which has been set forth. But as worked out in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves ignoring the interaction of present organic tendencies with the present environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. Some implicit whole is regarded as given ready-made and the significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not an end in itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already implicit. Since that which is not explicit cannot be made definite use of, something has to be found to represent it.\n\n According to Froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the Absolute Whole which is in process of unfolding. According to Hegel, existing institutions are its effective actual representatives. Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the direct growth of experience in richness of meaning. \n\nAnother influential but defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth, certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering, willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is the training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory treats subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the general powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the alleged powers from one another and from the material upon which they act. The outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at the expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability—qualities which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another. \n\n1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are so many paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about some change in all of the organs of response. We are accustomed however to ignore most of these modifications of the total organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment. \n\n2 This statement should be compared with what was said earlier about the sequential ordering of responses . It is merely a more explicit statement of the way in which that consecutive arrangement occurs.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13436-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:09', '2023-04-23 17:56:09', '', 13436, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13624', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13625, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:10', '2023-04-23 17:56:10', '4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate savagery and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless, the first answer to occur to mind is that savages are savages; being of low-grade intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But the careful study has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native differences are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture. In a sense, the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behaviour. Only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends. We start not so much with superior capacities as with superior stimuli for the evocation and direction of our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have been made over natural conditions. As they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavours. Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration, and every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and favouring conditions. Because the activities of children today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which have preceded them.\n\nStimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our system of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat, light, and electricity, and our ready-made machines and apparatus for every purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization, and without the things, the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed. A body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances of art supply protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the positive resources of civilization. If Greece, with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because Greece operated for social ends such resources as it had. But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control of physical forces or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation of mental and moral disposition.\n\nIntentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials and methods specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life—physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools—it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past human experiences, thus widening and enriching the experience of the present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In countless ways, language condenses meanings that record social outcomes and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in what is worthwhile in life that unlettered and uneducated have become almost synonymous.\n\nThe emphasis in school on this particular tool has, however, its dangers—dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice. Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, and learning by passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of \"telling\" and being told, but an active and constructive process is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this a deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of instruction and administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations with things. Not that the use of language as an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities. \"These things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others undone.\" And for the school \"these things\" mean equipment with the instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.\n\nFor when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning that things have in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in a joint activity, where one person\'s use of material and tools is consciously referred to as the use other persons are making of their capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13369-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:10', '2023-04-23 17:56:10', '', 13369, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13625', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13626, 1, '2023-04-23 17:56:11', '2023-04-23 17:56:11', '3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of a psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as it were, in contact with physical objects, and which believes that knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only comparatively recently has the predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. Even now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons. The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and impossible separation between persons and things. Interaction with things may form habits of external adjustment. But it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious intent only when things are used to produce a result. And the only way one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to physical objects. In substance, this so-called social psychology has been built upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation of mental disposition.\n\nAccording to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behaviour. According to our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for partaking with others in the use of things which lead to consequences of common interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for the cause of the effect. There can be no doubt that individuals forming a social group are like-minded; they understand one another. They tend to act with the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given similar circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to be engaged in \"imitating\" one another. In the sense that they are doing much the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough. But \"imitation\" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats the fact as an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power.\n\nAn objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This social fact is then taken as a psychological force, which produced the likeness. A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli. Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry and attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing the undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in different ways in groups having different customs. In one group, it may be met by recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, and in a third by an exhibition of contemptuous disregard. This happens, so it is said that the model set for imitation is different. But there is no need to appeal to imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means that the actual stimuli to behaviour are different. Conscious instruction plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence. Still more effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the way current in his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate with others on intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave. The pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way is unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation is mainly the product of conscious instruction and of the selective influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and ratifications of those with whom one associate.\n\nSuppose that someone rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the sight of the ball or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the situation—the game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling the ball back; it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and return it,—that the game may continue. The \"pattern\" or model is not the action of the other person. The whole situation requires that each should adapt his action in view of what the other person has done and is to do. Imitation may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has an interest in his own account; he wants to keep it going. He may then note how the other person catches and holds the ball in order to improve his own acts. He imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be done. And he imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his own initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One has only to consider how completely the child is dependent from his earliest days for the successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his acts into those of others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as others behave, and of developing an understanding of them in order that he may so behave. The pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation. As matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory affair which leaves little effect upon disposition. Idiots are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts but not the meaning of their performance. When we find children engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we would do if it were an important means of social control) we are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copycats. Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent act. It involves close observation and judicious selection of what will enable one to do better something which he already is trying to do. Used for a purpose, the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a factor in the development of effective action.\n\nThis excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts which enables one to participate effectively in associated activities. Only the friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads to the view that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to natural inclinations. Only failure to take account of the situations in which persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in promoting social control.', '', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13368-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-23 17:56:11', '2023-04-23 17:56:11', '', 13368, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13626', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13627, 16, '2023-04-24 08:26:44', '2023-04-24 08:26:44', '<span style=\"color: #000000;font-family: \'Times New Roman\';font-size: medium;text-align: justify;text-indent: 16px;background-color: #faebd0\">The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of education in a democratic community. For it is assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education—or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search for aims in education, we are not concerned with finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids it. We are rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own.</span>', 'Aims in Education', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'aims-in-education', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:26:45', '2023-04-24 08:26:45', '', 13250, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/aims-in-education/', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13628, 16, '2023-04-24 08:26:45', '2023-04-24 08:26:45', '<span style=\"color: #000000;font-family: \'Times New Roman\';font-size: medium;text-align: justify;text-indent: 16px;background-color: #faebd0\">The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of education in a democratic community. For it is assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education—or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search for aims in education, we are not concerned with finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids it. We are rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own.</span>', 'Aims in Education', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13627-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:26:45', '2023-04-24 08:26:45', '', 13627, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13628', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13629, 16, '2023-04-24 08:32:58', '2023-04-24 08:32:58', 'Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach the definition by the contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition of energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not an end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfils what went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state of affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently, there is no basis upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as a process of transformation and realization.\n\nConsider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees\' actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves. Now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them on the ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process. Since aims relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? To talk about an educational aim when approximately every act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another is to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completion of a process. Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the temporal succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. If bees anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education—or any other undertaking—where conditions do not permit foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be. In the next place, the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of a mere spectator but influences the steps taken to reach the end. Foresight functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves careful observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available for reaching the end and to discover the hindrances in the way. In the second place, it suggests the proper order or sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an economical selection and arrangement. In third place, it makes the choice of alternatives possible. If we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that, we can compare the value of the two courses of action and pass judgment upon their relative desirability. If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to avert it. Since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring about this result or that.\n\nOf course, these three points are closely connected with one another. We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents themselves, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning the chosen activity possesses, and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only a single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning attached to the act is limited. One only steams ahead toward the mark. Sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. But if unexpected difficulties offer themselves, one has not had as many resources at command as if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader survey of the possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed readjustments readily.\n\nThe net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, select, and order objects and our own capacities. To do these things means to have a mind—for the mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by the perception of facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the obstructions in the way,—or, if it is really a mind to do the thing and not a vague aspiration—it is to have a plan which takes account of resources and difficulties. Mind is the capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present conditions. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim or a purpose. A man is stupid or blind or unintelligent—lacking in mind—just in the degree to which in any activity he does not know what he is about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck, or when he forms plans apart from the study of the actual conditions, including his own capacities. Such relative absence of the mind means to make our feelings the measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we must \"stop, look, listen\" in making the plan of activity.\n\nTo identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show its value—its function in experience. We are only too given to making an entity out of the abstract noun \"consciousness.\" We forget that it comes from the adjective \"conscious.\" To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.', 'The Nature and Definition of an Aim', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-nature-and-definition-of-an-aim', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:32:58', '2023-04-24 08:32:58', '', 13627, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/aims-in-education/reply/13629/', 1, 'reply', '', 0),
(13630, 16, '2023-04-24 08:32:58', '2023-04-24 08:32:58', 'Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach the definition by the contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition of energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not an end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfils what went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state of affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently, there is no basis upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as a process of transformation and realization.\n\nConsider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees\' actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves. Now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them on the ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process. Since aims relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? To talk about an educational aim when approximately every act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another is to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completion of a process. Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the temporal succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. If bees anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education—or any other undertaking—where conditions do not permit foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be. In the next place, the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of a mere spectator but influences the steps taken to reach the end. Foresight functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves careful observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available for reaching the end and to discover the hindrances in the way. In the second place, it suggests the proper order or sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an economical selection and arrangement. In third place, it makes the choice of alternatives possible. If we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that, we can compare the value of the two courses of action and pass judgment upon their relative desirability. If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to avert it. Since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring about this result or that.\n\nOf course, these three points are closely connected with one another. We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents themselves, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning the chosen activity possesses, and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only a single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning attached to the act is limited. One only steams ahead toward the mark. Sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. But if unexpected difficulties offer themselves, one has not had as many resources at command as if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader survey of the possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed readjustments readily.\n\nThe net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, select, and order objects and our own capacities. To do these things means to have a mind—for the mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by the perception of facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the obstructions in the way,—or, if it is really a mind to do the thing and not a vague aspiration—it is to have a plan which takes account of resources and difficulties. Mind is the capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present conditions. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim or a purpose. A man is stupid or blind or unintelligent—lacking in mind—just in the degree to which in any activity he does not know what he is about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck, or when he forms plans apart from the study of the actual conditions, including his own capacities. Such relative absence of the mind means to make our feelings the measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we must \"stop, look, listen\" in making the plan of activity.\n\nTo identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show its value—its function in experience. We are only too given to making an entity out of the abstract noun \"consciousness.\" We forget that it comes from the adjective \"conscious.\" To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.', 'The Nature and Definition of an Aim', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13629-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:32:58', '2023-04-24 08:32:58', '', 13629, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13630', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13631, 16, '2023-04-24 08:36:02', '2023-04-24 08:36:02', 'The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion to a consideration of the criteria involved in the correct establishing of aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. It must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper end of our activities—educational and moral theories—often violate this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities; ends foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities to bear upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. They are something for which we ought to act. In any case such \"aims\" limit intelligence; they are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of the better among alternative possibilities. They limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means.\n\n(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually—at least in complicated situations—acting upon it brings to light conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances. \n\nThe value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change conditions. It is a method for dealing with conditions so as to effect desired alterations in them. A farmer who should passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action.\n\n(3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define an activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it terminates—as one\'s aim in shooting is the target. But we must remember that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the activity one desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target, but also by the sight of the gun. The different objects which are thought of are means of directing the activity. Thus one aims at, say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of activity. Or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of his marksmanship—he wants to do something with it. The doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end. The object is but a phase of the active end,—continuing the activity successfully. This is what is meant by the phrase, used above, \"freeing activity.\"\n\nIn contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed without the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which is alone worthwhile. In other words, the external idea of the aim leads to a separation of means from the end, while an end which grows up within an activity as a plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it to end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could. A farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming activities. It certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he is fond of them, or whether he regards them merely as means which he has to employ to get something else in which alone he is interested. In the former case, his entire course of activity is significant; each phase of it has its own value. He has the experience of realizing his end at every stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, is merely a sight ahead by which to keep his activity going fully and freely. For if he does not look ahead, he is more likely to find himself blocked. The aim is as definitely a means of action as is any other portion of an activity.', 'The Criteria of Good Aims', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-criteria-of-good-aims', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:42:09', '2023-04-24 08:42:09', '', 13627, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/aims-in-education/reply/13631/', 2, 'reply', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13632, 16, '2023-04-24 08:36:03', '2023-04-24 08:36:03', 'The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion to a consideration of the criteria involved in the correct establishing of aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. It must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper end of our activities—educational and moral theories—often violate this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities; ends foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities to bear upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. They are something for which we ought to act. In any case such \"aims\" limit intelligence; they are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of the better among alternative possibilities. They limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means.\n\n(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually—at least in complicated situations—acting upon it brings to light conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances. \n\nThe value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change conditions. It is a method for dealing with conditions so as to effect desired alterations in them. A farmer who should passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action.', 'The Criteria of Good Aims', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13631-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:36:03', '2023-04-24 08:36:03', '', 13631, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13632', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13633, 16, '2023-04-24 08:48:09', '2023-04-24 08:48:09', ' Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation. The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, and the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his activities and their energies work together, instead of against one another. It would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristics of plant growth, etc. His purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day. The foresight of possible consequences leads to the more careful and extensive observation of the nature and performances of the things he had to do with, and to lay out a plan—that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed.\n\nIt is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as absurd for the latter to set up his \"own\" aims as the proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements required in carrying on a function—whether farming or educating. Any aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in the way of the individual\'s own common sense (as it will surely do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.\n\nAnd it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only persons, parents, teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract ideas like education. And consequently, their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has said: \"To lead this boy to read Scott\'s novels instead of old Sleuth\'s stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John\'s make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,—these are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education.\" Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including original instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. \n\nThe tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In general, there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated. There is also an inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have adult achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance of the drawing, reproducing, modelling, and colouring activities of childhood. So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.\n\n(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating with the activities of those undergoing the instruction. It must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberate and organize their capacities. Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is worthless. Instead of helping with the specific task of teaching, it prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the situation. It operates to exclude recognition of everything except what squares up with the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details which do not count?\n\nThe vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of an authoritative supervisor, a textbook on methods, a prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil\'s mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher\'s experience is then reflected in a lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition and are constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.\n\n(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is, of course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out indefinitely into other things. So far as a general idea makes us more alive to these connections, it cannot be too general. But \"general\" also means \"abstract,\" or detached from all specific contexts. And such abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means. That education is literally and all the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worthwhile in its own immediate having. \n\nA truly general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more consequences (connections) into account. This means a wider and more flexible observation of means. The more interacting forces, for example, the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his immediate resources. He will see a greater number of possible starting places and a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants to do. The fuller one\'s conception of possible future achievements, the less his present activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives. If one knew enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and fruitfully.\n\nUnderstanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the educator\'s real concern. We promise (as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that there is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them as competitors. When we come to act in a tangible way we have to select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition since they mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene. One cannot climb a number of different mountains simultaneously, but the views had when different mountains are ascended supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible, competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in a slightly different way, one statement of an end may suggest certain questions and observations, and another statement another set of questions, calling for other observations. Then the more general ends we have, the better. One statement will emphasize what another slurs over. What a plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor.', 'Applications in Education', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'applications-in-education', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:48:10', '2023-04-24 08:48:10', '', 13627, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/aims-in-education/reply/13633/', 3, 'reply', '', 0),
(13634, 16, '2023-04-24 08:48:10', '2023-04-24 08:48:10', ' Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation. The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, and the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his activities and their energies work together, instead of against one another. It would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristics of plant growth, etc. His purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day. The foresight of possible consequences leads to the more careful and extensive observation of the nature and performances of the things he had to do with, and to lay out a plan—that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed.\n\nIt is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as absurd for the latter to set up his \"own\" aims as the proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements required in carrying on a function—whether farming or educating. Any aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in the way of the individual\'s own common sense (as it will surely do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.\n\nAnd it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only persons, parents, teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract ideas like education. And consequently, their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has said: \"To lead this boy to read Scott\'s novels instead of old Sleuth\'s stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John\'s make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,—these are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education.\" Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including original instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. \n\nThe tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In general, there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated. There is also an inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have adult achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance of the drawing, reproducing, modelling, and colouring activities of childhood. So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.\n\n(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating with the activities of those undergoing the instruction. It must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberate and organize their capacities. Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is worthless. Instead of helping with the specific task of teaching, it prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the situation. It operates to exclude recognition of everything except what squares up with the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details which do not count?\n\nThe vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of an authoritative supervisor, a textbook on methods, a prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil\'s mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher\'s experience is then reflected in a lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition and are constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.\n\n(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is, of course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out indefinitely into other things. So far as a general idea makes us more alive to these connections, it cannot be too general. But \"general\" also means \"abstract,\" or detached from all specific contexts. And such abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means. That education is literally and all the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worthwhile in its own immediate having. \n\nA truly general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more consequences (connections) into account. This means a wider and more flexible observation of means. The more interacting forces, for example, the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his immediate resources. He will see a greater number of possible starting places and a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants to do. The fuller one\'s conception of possible future achievements, the less his present activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives. If one knew enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and fruitfully.\n\nUnderstanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the educator\'s real concern. We promise (as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that there is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them as competitors. When we come to act in a tangible way we have to select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition since they mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene. One cannot climb a number of different mountains simultaneously, but the views had when different mountains are ascended supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible, competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in a slightly different way, one statement of an end may suggest certain questions and observations, and another statement another set of questions, calling for other observations. Then the more general ends we have, the better. One statement will emphasize what another slurs over. What a plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor.', 'Applications in Education', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13633-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:48:10', '2023-04-24 08:48:10', '', 13633, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13634', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13635, 16, '2023-04-24 08:53:19', '2023-04-24 08:53:19', 'An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation and choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has become intelligent. Specifically, it means foresight of the alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and experiment. \n\nA true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a process of action from without. The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a stimulus to intelligence in the given situation but is an externally dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of connecting directly with present activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it is to be reached. Instead of suggesting a freer and better-balanced activity, it is a limit set to the activity. In education, the currency of these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.\n\n\n', 'Summary: Aims in Education', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'summary-aims-in-education', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:53:19', '2023-04-24 08:53:19', '', 13627, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/aims-in-education/reply/13635/', 4, 'reply', '', 0),
(13636, 16, '2023-04-24 08:53:19', '2023-04-24 08:53:19', 'An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation and choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has become intelligent. Specifically, it means foresight of the alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and experiment. \n\nA true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a process of action from without. The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a stimulus to intelligence in the given situation but is an externally dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of connecting directly with present activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it is to be reached. Instead of suggesting a freer and better-balanced activity, it is a limit set to the activity. In education, the currency of these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.\n\n\n', 'Summary: Aims in Education', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13635-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 08:53:19', '2023-04-24 08:53:19', '', 13635, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13636', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13637, 16, '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '<p style=\"text-indent: 1em;margin-top: 0.25em;margin-bottom: 0.25em;color: #000000;font-family: \'Times New Roman\';font-size: medium;text-align: justify\">We have just pointed out the futility of trying to establish the aim of education—someone\'s final aim which subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a large number have been stated at different times, all having great local value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time. And we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis—that is, such things as taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement which would be of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about. It is, then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it has least of in actual fact. A time of domination by the authority will call out as a response to the desirability of great individual freedom; one of the disorganized individual activities is the need for social control as an educational aim.</p>', 'Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '', 13250, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims/', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13638, 16, '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '<p style=\"text-indent: 1em;margin-top: 0.25em;margin-bottom: 0.25em;color: #000000;font-family: \'Times New Roman\';font-size: medium;text-align: justify\">We have just pointed out the futility of trying to establish the aim of education—someone\'s final aim which subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a large number have been stated at different times, all having great local value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time. And we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis—that is, such things as taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement which would be of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about. It is, then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it has least of in actual fact. A time of domination by the authority will call out as a response to the desirability of great individual freedom; one of the disorganized individual activities is the need for social control as an educational aim.</p>', 'Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13637-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '2023-04-24 09:03:12', '', 13637, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13638', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13639, 16, '2023-04-24 09:12:08', '2023-04-24 09:12:08', 'The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living, better methods of language study, the substitution of things for words, social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, an esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies. We begin with a consideration that education is a process of development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau\'s statement, which opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.\n\n(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her ways. The positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the ease with which natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical. The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way and allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.\n\n\"Education,\" he says, \"we receive from three sources—Nature, men, and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to put this development constitutes that education has given us by Men. The acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we are asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since the concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must necessarily regulate us in determining the other two.\" Then he defines Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, \"as they exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the influence of the opinion of others.\"\n\nThe wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said in the first sentences. The three factors of educative development are (a) the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put under the influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with the environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities of the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But it requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these three things as factors which must work together to some extent in order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate and independent operations. Especially does he believe that there is an independent and, as he says, \"spontaneous\" development of the native organs and faculties. \n\nHe thinks that this development can go on irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this separate development that education coming from social contact is to be subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between the use of native activities in accord with those activities themselves—as distinct from forcing them and perverting them—and supposing that they have a normal development apart from any use, which development furnishes the standard and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous illustration, the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of the vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau\'s principle would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development of articulate speech—which they are—but as furnishing language itself—the standard for all teaching of language.\n\nThe point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right, introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their development. As matter of fact, the native activities develop, in contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to which they are put. And the office of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth by putting powers to the best possible use. The instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of operation,—a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the notion of spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure mythology. \n\nThe natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no learning except the beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers. Rousseau\'s contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him the original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the old saying about the country and the town, God made the original human organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put. Consequently, the development of the former furnishes the standard to which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine the uses to which the original activities shall be put, they interfere with a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with Nature, God\'s work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.\n\nRousseau\'s passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all-natural tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total depravity of innate human nature and has had a powerful influence in modifying the attitude towards children\'s interests. But it is hardly necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave them alone to follow their own \"spontaneous development,\" but to provide an environment which shall organize them.\n\nReturning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau\'s statements, we find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point out the means of correcting many evils in current practices and to indicate a number of desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention on the bodily organs and the need of health and vigour. The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigour of the body—an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our educational practices. \"Nature\" is indeed a vague and metaphorical term, but one thing that \"Nature\" may be said to utter is that there are conditions of educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what these conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer—are verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious.\n\n(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect for physical mobility. In Rousseau\'s words: \"Children are always in motion; a sedentary life is injurious.\" When he says that \"Nature\'s intention is to strengthen the body before exercising the mind\" he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he had said that nature\'s \"intention\" (to adopt his poetical form of speech) is to develop the mind, especially by the exercise of the muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In other words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete, regard for the actual part played by the use of the bodily organs in explorations, in the handling of materials, in plays and games. (3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for individual differences among children. Nobody can take the principle of consideration of native powers into account without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different individuals. The difference applies not merely to their intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement. As Rousseau said: \"Each individual is born with a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive.\"\n\nLastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings of power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of early childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern with the early years of life—as distinct from the inculcation of useful arts—dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a student on the growth of the nervous system. \"While growth continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at another. The methods which shall recognize in the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the rounding outgained by pruning will most closely follow that which takes place in the body and thus prove most effective.\" \n\n1 Observation of natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They show themselves most readily in a child\'s spontaneous sayings and doings,—that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks and when not aware of being under observation. It does not follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be taken into account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have an environment which keeps them active and that their activity shall control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much direct attention to them only fixes a child\'s attention upon them. At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as standards and regard all deviations of children\'s impulses as evils to be eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of following nature is so largely a protest is the outcome of attempts to force children directly into the mould of grown-up standards.\n\nIn conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically unlimited power to it. All the differences between people and between classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind, reason, and understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all. This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less formal and abstract view of the mind and its powers. It substituted specific instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out, even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment, memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great as is the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation through direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities, affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. \n\nOn the other hand, the doctrine of the following nature was a political dogma. It meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau\'s statement that everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: \"Everything degenerates in the hands of man.\" And again he says: \"Natural man has an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no relation save to himself and to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the integral body of society. Good political institutions are those which make a man unnatural.\" It is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful character of organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal. That evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is true enough, but the conclusion is not to education apart from the environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers will be put to better uses.', 'Nature as Supplying the Aim', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'nature-as-supplying-the-aim', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:12:08', '2023-04-24 09:12:08', '', 13637, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims/reply/13639/', 1, 'reply', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13640, 16, '2023-04-24 09:12:08', '2023-04-24 09:12:08', 'The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living, better methods of language study, the substitution of things for words, social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, an esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies. We begin with a consideration that education is a process of development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau\'s statement, which opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.\n\n(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her ways. The positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the ease with which natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical. The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way and allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.\n\n\"Education,\" he says, \"we receive from three sources—Nature, men, and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to put this development constitutes that education has given us by Men. The acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we are asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since the concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must necessarily regulate us in determining the other two.\" Then he defines Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, \"as they exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the influence of the opinion of others.\"\n\nThe wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said in the first sentences. The three factors of educative development are (a) the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put under the influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with the environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities of the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But it requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these three things as factors which must work together to some extent in order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate and independent operations. Especially does he believe that there is an independent and, as he says, \"spontaneous\" development of the native organs and faculties. \n\nHe thinks that this development can go on irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this separate development that education coming from social contact is to be subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between the use of native activities in accord with those activities themselves—as distinct from forcing them and perverting them—and supposing that they have a normal development apart from any use, which development furnishes the standard and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous illustration, the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of the vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau\'s principle would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development of articulate speech—which they are—but as furnishing language itself—the standard for all teaching of language.\n\nThe point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right, introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their development. As matter of fact, the native activities develop, in contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to which they are put. And the office of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth by putting powers to the best possible use. The instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of operation,—a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the notion of spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure mythology. \n\nThe natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no learning except the beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers. Rousseau\'s contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him the original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the old saying about the country and the town, God made the original human organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put. Consequently, the development of the former furnishes the standard to which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine the uses to which the original activities shall be put, they interfere with a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with Nature, God\'s work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.\n\nRousseau\'s passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all-natural tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total depravity of innate human nature and has had a powerful influence in modifying the attitude towards children\'s interests. But it is hardly necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave them alone to follow their own \"spontaneous development,\" but to provide an environment which shall organize them.\n\nReturning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau\'s statements, we find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point out the means of correcting many evils in current practices and to indicate a number of desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention on the bodily organs and the need of health and vigour. The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigour of the body—an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our educational practices. \"Nature\" is indeed a vague and metaphorical term, but one thing that \"Nature\" may be said to utter is that there are conditions of educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what these conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer—are verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious.\n\n(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect for physical mobility. In Rousseau\'s words: \"Children are always in motion; a sedentary life is injurious.\" When he says that \"Nature\'s intention is to strengthen the body before exercising the mind\" he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he had said that nature\'s \"intention\" (to adopt his poetical form of speech) is to develop the mind, especially by the exercise of the muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In other words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete, regard for the actual part played by the use of the bodily organs in explorations, in the handling of materials, in plays and games. (3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for individual differences among children. Nobody can take the principle of consideration of native powers into account without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different individuals. The difference applies not merely to their intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement. As Rousseau said: \"Each individual is born with a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive.\"\n\nLastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings of power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of early childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern with the early years of life—as distinct from the inculcation of useful arts—dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a student on the growth of the nervous system. \"While growth continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at another. The methods which shall recognize in the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the rounding outgained by pruning will most closely follow that which takes place in the body and thus prove most effective.\" \n\n1 Observation of natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They show themselves most readily in a child\'s spontaneous sayings and doings,—that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks and when not aware of being under observation. It does not follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be taken into account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have an environment which keeps them active and that their activity shall control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much direct attention to them only fixes a child\'s attention upon them. At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as standards and regard all deviations of children\'s impulses as evils to be eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of following nature is so largely a protest is the outcome of attempts to force children directly into the mould of grown-up standards.\n\nIn conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically unlimited power to it. All the differences between people and between classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind, reason, and understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all. This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less formal and abstract view of the mind and its powers. It substituted specific instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out, even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment, memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great as is the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation through direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities, affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. \n\nOn the other hand, the doctrine of the following nature was a political dogma. It meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau\'s statement that everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: \"Everything degenerates in the hands of man.\" And again he says: \"Natural man has an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no relation save to himself and to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the integral body of society. Good political institutions are those which make a man unnatural.\" It is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful character of organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal. That evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is true enough, but the conclusion is not to education apart from the environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers will be put to better uses.', 'Nature as Supplying the Aim', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13639-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:12:08', '2023-04-24 09:12:08', '', 13639, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13640', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13641, 16, '2023-04-24 09:17:43', '2023-04-24 09:17:43', 'Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the end of a true education and society the end of an evil one could hardly fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what nature fails to secure; namely, the habituation of an individual to social control; subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not surprising to find that the value in the idea of social efficiency resides largely in its protest against the points at which the doctrine of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is employed to slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we must look to the activities and achievements of associated life to find what the development of power—that is to say, efficiency—means. The error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning. \n\n(1) Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence on all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is a grave danger that he may deprive himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of education should have as a result ability to make one\'s way economically in the world and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury should receive emphasis.\n\nThere is, however, the grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop the capacity to the point of competency to choose and make our own careers. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently, an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. \n\nWhen the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had less definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial constitution of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control means the subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is a danger that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences in economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of selection.\n\n(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary to separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which are vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever makes an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political sense: it denotes the ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the things which most need to be done are things which involve one\'s relationships with others.\n\nHere again, we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last analysis security of social progress depends upon them. Scientific men would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately social efficiency means neither more nor less than the capacity to share in a give-and-take of experience. It covers all that makes one\'s own experience more worthwhile to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others. The ability to produce and to enjoy art, the capacity for recreation, and the significant utilization of leisure, are more important elements in it than elements conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make individuals impervious to the interests of others. \n\nWhen social efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its chief constituent (because it\'s only guarantee) is omitted,—intelligent sympathy or goodwill. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something more than a mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them. What is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead of an endeavour to free them so that they may seek and find the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service, are hard and metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgement of the diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons, and from faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent.', 'Social Efficiency as Aim', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'social-efficiency-as-aim', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:17:43', '2023-04-24 09:17:43', '', 13637, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims/reply/13641/', 2, 'reply', '', 0),
(13642, 16, '2023-04-24 09:17:43', '2023-04-24 09:17:43', 'Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the end of a true education and society the end of an evil one could hardly fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what nature fails to secure; namely, the habituation of an individual to social control; subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not surprising to find that the value in the idea of social efficiency resides largely in its protest against the points at which the doctrine of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is employed to slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we must look to the activities and achievements of associated life to find what the development of power—that is to say, efficiency—means. The error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning. \n\n(1) Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence on all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is a grave danger that he may deprive himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of education should have as a result ability to make one\'s way economically in the world and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury should receive emphasis.\n\nThere is, however, the grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop the capacity to the point of competency to choose and make our own careers. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently, an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. \n\nWhen the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had less definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial constitution of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control means the subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is a danger that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences in economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of selection.\n\n(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary to separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which are vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever makes an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political sense: it denotes the ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the things which most need to be done are things which involve one\'s relationships with others.\n\nHere again, we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last analysis security of social progress depends upon them. Scientific men would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately social efficiency means neither more nor less than the capacity to share in a give-and-take of experience. It covers all that makes one\'s own experience more worthwhile to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others. The ability to produce and to enjoy art, the capacity for recreation, and the significant utilization of leisure, are more important elements in it than elements conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make individuals impervious to the interests of others. \n\nWhen social efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its chief constituent (because it\'s only guarantee) is omitted,—intelligent sympathy or goodwill. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something more than a mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them. What is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead of an endeavour to free them so that they may seek and find the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service, are hard and metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgement of the diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons, and from faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent.', 'Social Efficiency as Aim', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13641-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:17:43', '2023-04-24 09:17:43', '', 13641, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13642', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13643, 16, '2023-04-24 09:32:50', '2023-04-24 09:32:50', 'Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the \"natural\" is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical to the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual—and he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed, the distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities. How can there be a society really worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities?\n\nThe fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid division of inferiority and superiority. The latter is supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former is confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for the development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential justification.\n\nThe aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an external aim strengthens by a reaction to the false conception of culture which identifies it with something purely \"inner.\" And the idea of perfecting an \"inner\" personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others—which is not capable of free and full communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally—and therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. This transcends both efficiencies which consist in supplying products to others and culture which is an exclusive refinement and polish.\n\nAny individual who has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher, or student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently worthwhile. Why then should it be thought that one must take his choice between sacrificing himself to do useful things for others, or sacrificing them to pursue his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul or the building of inner spiritual life and personality? What happens is that since neither of these things is persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries each course in turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of life. The dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time to struggle on behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.', 'Culture as Aim', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'culture-as-aim', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:32:51', '2023-04-24 09:32:51', '', 13637, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims/reply/13643/', 3, 'reply', '', 0),
(13644, 16, '2023-04-24 09:32:51', '2023-04-24 09:32:51', 'Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the \"natural\" is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical to the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual—and he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed, the distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities. How can there be a society really worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities?\n\nThe fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid division of inferiority and superiority. The latter is supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former is confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for the development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential justification.\n\nThe aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an external aim strengthens by a reaction to the false conception of culture which identifies it with something purely \"inner.\" And the idea of perfecting an \"inner\" personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others—which is not capable of free and full communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally—and therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. This transcends both efficiencies which consist in supplying products to others and culture which is an exclusive refinement and polish.\n\nAny individual who has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher, or student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently worthwhile. Why then should it be thought that one must take his choice between sacrificing himself to do useful things for others, or sacrificing them to pursue his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul or the building of inner spiritual life and personality? What happens is that since neither of these things is persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries each course in turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of life. The dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time to struggle on behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.', 'Culture as Aim', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13643-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:32:51', '2023-04-24 09:32:51', '', 13643, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13644', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13645, 16, '2023-04-24 09:56:59', '2023-04-24 09:56:59', 'General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying the specific problems of education. Consequently, it is a test of the value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are suggested by another. We have applied this test to three general aims: Development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or personal mental enrichment. In each case, we have seen that the aims when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The partial statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point of view training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint; one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is corrupting. \nBut when we recognize that natural activities mean native activities which develop only through the uses in which they are nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly, social efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering external service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean the cultivation of power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities. This is impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture because one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning—without getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one\'s perception of meanings.', 'Summary: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'summary-natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:56:59', '2023-04-24 09:56:59', '', 13637, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/applied-science/education-forum/topic/natural-development-and-social-efficiency-as-aims/reply/13645/', 4, 'reply', '', 0),
(13646, 16, '2023-04-24 09:56:59', '2023-04-24 09:56:59', 'General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying the specific problems of education. Consequently, it is a test of the value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are suggested by another. We have applied this test to three general aims: Development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or personal mental enrichment. In each case, we have seen that the aims when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The partial statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point of view training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint; one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is corrupting. \nBut when we recognize that natural activities mean native activities which develop only through the uses in which they are nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly, social efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering external service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean the cultivation of power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities. This is impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture because one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning—without getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one\'s perception of meanings.', 'Summary: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13645-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-24 09:56:59', '2023-04-24 09:56:59', '', 13645, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13646', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13647, 1, '2023-04-26 09:07:13', '2023-04-26 09:07:13', '<p style=\"text-align: center;\">(1.) Don\'t send a learner away from your class during teaching and learning as a result of bad behavior. This is because you cannot account for what the student may be doing outside and this can count against you if an accident occurs.</p>\n(2.) Don\'t touch a learner inordinately. This is because the learner might claim he or she was abused either sexually/physically.You may not be able to refute it.\n\n(3.) Don\'t give assignments you don\'t have time to mark. Unmarked assignments or home work indicate incompetence/unprofessionalism.\n\n(4.) Don\'t give emotional punishment to your learners. It reduces their chances of becoming better learners.\n\n(5.) Don\'t just teach within the period given to you, especially when you are preparing learners for external examinations. Do create more contact time for your learners.\n\n(6.) Don\'t stay with a learner alone in a class, laboratory, office etc. Child\'s protection policy forbids it. Try and avoid \"one corner\" teaching.\n\n(7.) Don\'t ask a child to kneel  for too long a time. He or she might have a health challenge you are not aware of.\n\n(8.) Don\'t conspire against your school head.What goes around, comes around.\n\n(9.) Don\'t be a difficult  educator and avoid transferred aggression on any learner. Pocket your personal challenges and always be full of life.\n\n(10.) Don\'t treat learners unequally. There should be nothing like favourite learner. Every child matters.\n\nManagement.\n\n&nbsp;\n\nCopied!', 'TEN (10) MISTAKES TO AVOID AS A 21ST CENTURY TEACHER !!!', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'ten-10-mistakes-to-avoid-as-a-21st-century-teacher', '', '', '2023-04-26 09:07:14', '2023-04-26 09:07:14', '', 13427, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/forum/professional-subject-forums/education-specific-forums/educational-philosophy-forum/topic/ten-10-mistakes-to-avoid-as-a-21st-century-teacher/', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13648, 1, '2023-04-26 09:07:14', '2023-04-26 09:07:14', '<p style=\"text-align: center;\">(1.) Don\'t send a learner away from your class during teaching and learning as a result of bad behavior. This is because you cannot account for what the student may be doing outside and this can count against you if an accident occurs.</p>\n(2.) Don\'t touch a learner inordinately. This is because the learner might claim he or she was abused either sexually/physically.You may not be able to refute it.\n\n(3.) Don\'t give assignments you don\'t have time to mark. Unmarked assignments or home work indicate incompetence/unprofessionalism.\n\n(4.) Don\'t give emotional punishment to your learners. It reduces their chances of becoming better learners.\n\n(5.) Don\'t just teach within the period given to you, especially when you are preparing learners for external examinations. Do create more contact time for your learners.\n\n(6.) Don\'t stay with a learner alone in a class, laboratory, office etc. Child\'s protection policy forbids it. Try and avoid \"one corner\" teaching.\n\n(7.) Don\'t ask a child to kneel  for too long a time. He or she might have a health challenge you are not aware of.\n\n(8.) Don\'t conspire against your school head.What goes around, comes around.\n\n(9.) Don\'t be a difficult  educator and avoid transferred aggression on any learner. Pocket your personal challenges and always be full of life.\n\n(10.) Don\'t treat learners unequally. There should be nothing like favourite learner. Every child matters.\n\nManagement.\n\n&nbsp;\n\nCopied!', 'TEN (10) MISTAKES TO AVOID AS A 21ST CENTURY TEACHER !!!', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13647-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-04-26 09:07:14', '2023-04-26 09:07:14', '', 13647, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13648', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13650, 1, '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '', 'Login', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'login-3', '', '', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13650', 6, 'nav_menu_item', '', 0),
(13651, 1, '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '', 'Register', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'register-3', '', '', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13651', 7, 'nav_menu_item', '', 0),
(13652, 1, '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '', 'Logout', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'logout-2', '', '', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '2023-05-05 19:54:30', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13652', 8, 'nav_menu_item', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `teac_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(13658, 16, '2023-05-07 11:48:18', '2023-05-07 11:48:18', '. The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His fortunes are more or less at stake in the issue of events. Consequently, he does whatever he can to influence the direction present occurrences take. One is like a man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the window; it is all the same to him. The other is like a man who has planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will frustrate. He cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions affect tomorrow\'s weather, but he may take some steps which will influence future happenings if only to postpone the proposed picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him, if he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the way if he foresees the consequence in time. In many instances, he can intervene even more directly. The attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a tendency to act to assure better and avert worse, consequences. There are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest. These words suggest that a person is bound up with the possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the basis of his expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as to give things one turn rather than another. Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. Such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of solicitude and attentive eagerness. Such words as interest, affection, concern, and motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the individual\'s fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a possible result. They take for granted the objective changes. But the difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one set of words is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated is objective and impersonal; tomorrow\'s rain; the possibility of being run over. But for an active being, a being who partakes in the consequences instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response. The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort. While such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward objects—toward what is foreseen. We may call the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts of the situation.\n\nSuch a separation could exist only if personal attitudes ran their course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to what is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction with other changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in connection with changes in the environment. They are literally bound up with these changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons about us. Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they indicate the non-existence of such a separate world. They afford convincing evidence that changes in things are not alien to the activities of a self and that the career and welfare of the self are bound up with the movement of persons and things. Interest, and concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation.\n\nThe word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state of active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination.\n\n(I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, or business is often referred to as an interest. Thus we say that a man\'s interest is politics, or journalism, or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese prints, or banking.\n\n(ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches or engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some legal transactions, a man has to prove \"interest\" in order to have a standing at court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs. A silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no active part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his profits and liabilities.\n\n(iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, or carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We say of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself in it. Both terms express the engrossment of the self in an object.\n\nWhen the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is merely the effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure. Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is properly stigmatized as \"soft\" pedagogy; as a \"soup-kitchen\" theory of education.\n\nBut the objection is based upon the fact—or assumption—that the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material. It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with present powers. The function of this material in engaging activity and carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. If the material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to the arbitrary, semi-coerced effort.\n\nThe word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,—that which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between the initial stage of the process and the completing period; that there is something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit. Between the two lies means—that is middle conditions:—acts to be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. Only through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities reach a satisfactory consummation.\n\nThese intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end depends upon them. To mean for the achieving of present tendencies, to be \"between\" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different names for the same thing. When material has to be made interesting, it signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power: or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived. To make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have been applied to the doctrine of interest in education.\n\nSo much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence are required. It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist and endure in a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary solicitations. A man of strong will, in the widespread usage of the words, is a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His ability is executive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.', 'Interest and Discipline', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'interest-and-discipline', '', '', '2023-05-07 11:48:18', '2023-05-07 11:48:18', '', 13250, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/topic/interest-and-discipline/', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13659, 16, '2023-05-07 11:59:39', '2023-05-07 11:59:39', 'Clearly, there are two factors in the will. One has to do with the foresight of results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has upon the person.\n\n(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not the strength of volition. Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worthwhile. Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in the use of means to achieve the end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show themselves. They are discouraged or complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action. That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.\n\n(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay a deep hold of a person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as one-sided intellectuality. A person \"takes it out\" as we say in considering the consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fibre prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in action. And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by the presentation of inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.\n\nA person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline. Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources available for carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind. Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task—these things are or are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the development of power to recognize what one is about and to persistence in accomplishment.\n\nIt is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline are connected, not opposed.\n\n(i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power—apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences—is not possible without interest. Deliberation will be perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents and teachers often complain—and correctly—that children \"do not want to hear, or want to understand.\" Their minds are not upon the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into their concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of methods which increase indifference and aversion. Even punishing a child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of arousing \"interest,\" or bringing about a sense of connection. In the long run, its value is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the adult or whether it leads the child \"to think\"—that is, to reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.\n\n(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not interested in what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that the person engaged would stick to his work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures—or rather is—the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving one to act for its realization.', '', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13659', '', '', '2023-05-07 11:59:39', '2023-05-07 11:59:39', '', 13658, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/reply/13659/', 1, 'reply', '', 0),
(13660, 16, '2023-05-07 14:47:27', '2023-05-07 14:47:27', '2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education. Interest represents the moving force of objects—whether perceived or presented in imagination—in any experience having a purpose. In the concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest in educative development is that it leads to considering individual children in their specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. One who recognizes the importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal the same material makes, this appeal itself varies with differences of natural aptitude, of past experience, plan of life, and so on. But the facts of interest also supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of education.\n\nRightly understood, they put us on our guard against certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have had great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which exercise a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of instruction and discipline. Too frequently mind is set over the world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as something existing in isolation, with mental states and operations that exist independently. Knowledge is then regarded as an external application of purely mental existences to the things to be known, or else as a result of the impressions that this outside subject matter makes on the mind, or as a combination of the two. Subject matter is then regarded as something complete in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by the voluntary application of the mind to it or through the impressions it makes on the mind.\n\nThe facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind appears in experience as the ability to respond to present stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. The things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very intelligible. An illustration may clear up their significance. You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter. If you are an expert, your formed habits take care of the physical movements and leave your thoughts free to consider your topic. Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or that, even if you are, the machine does not work well.\n\nYou then have to use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the keys at random and let the consequences be what they may; you wish to record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. You attend to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine. Your attention is not distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is centred upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as they are factors in the achievement of the result intended. You have to find out what your resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen constitute the mind. Action that does not involve such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is it intelligent? To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.\n\nIf we recur to the case where the mind is not concerned with the physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the case is the same. There is an activity in the process; one is taken up with the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending, together with continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be reached. The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward the end. Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no intelligence in present behaviour. Let there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle dreaming—abortive intelligence.\n\nIf this illustration is typical, the mind is not a name for something complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter into it, with the selection of means to further the attainment of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns, but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities in which a person engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself; they are something in which he engages and partakes. Other things, the independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and hinder. The individual\'s act may be initiated in a course of events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of his response with energies supplied by other agencies. Conceive the mind as anything but one factor partaking along with others in the production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless.\n\nThe problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken of is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its training. Discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried through without reflection and use of judgment to select material of observation and recollection, is the remedy. In short, the root of the error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future results in which individual shares, and in the direction of which observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in regarding the mind as complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to present material.\n\nIn historic practice, the error has been cut two ways. On one hand, it has screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are \"disciplinary\" has safeguarded them from all inquiries. It has not been enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did not really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were \"disciplinary\" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue as a matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost the power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods.\n\nThe responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end. It was designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it was because the individual was unwilling to be disciplined. In the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative conception of discipline, instead of an identification of it with growth in constructive power of achievement. As we have already seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward the production of possible consequences, an attitude involving an effort to foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable results of ways of acting, and an active identification with some anticipated consequences. Identification of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up, endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing material.\n\nA person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter in hand. The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern it has for the habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it—and hence the more discipline of the will. To attend to material because there is something to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of constructive power. Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgement of duty or the value of discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the words of an American humorist: \"It makes no difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn\'t like it.\"\n\nThe counterpart of the isolation of the mind from activities dealing with objects to accomplish ends is the isolation of the subject matter to be learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means so much material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement complete within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra another; geography another, and so on till we have run through the entire curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account, their relation to the mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire. This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of \"studies\" all marked off from one another, and each is supposed to be complete by itself—for educational purposes at least.\n\nLater on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything which intelligence studies represents things in the part they play in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. Just as one \"studies\" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with any fact or truth. It becomes an object of study—that is, of inquiry and reflection—when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. Numbers are not objects of study just because they are numbers already constituting a branch of learning called mathematics, but because they represent qualities and relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are factors upon which the accomplishment of our purposes depends. As stated thus broadly, the formula may appear abstract. Translated into details, it means that the act of learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned. The study is effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in education.', '', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13660', '', '', '2023-05-07 14:47:27', '2023-05-07 14:47:27', '', 13658, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/reply/13660/', 2, 'reply', '', 0),
(13661, 16, '2023-05-07 14:50:30', '2023-05-07 14:50:30', '3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors of which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life. A change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts to modify social conditions. Men\'s fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. The idea of interest is exemplified in the artistic attitude. Art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor merely physical. Like every mode of action, it brings about changes in the world. The changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about. No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and display. Many of our existing social activities, industrial and political, fall in these two classes. Neither the people who engage in them nor those who are directly affected by them, are capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately engaged. The same conditions force many people back upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but not artistic since their feelings and ideas are turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life—not a temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. The very word art may become associated not with the specific transformation of things, making them more significant for the mind, but with stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The separation and mutual contempt of the \"practical\" man and the man of theory or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed or else made perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of efficiency and of culture.\n\nThis state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis of division between labouring classes and leisure classes. The intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources of the environment. Our economic conditions still relegate many men to a servile status. As a consequence, the intelligence of those in control of the practical situation is not liberal. Instead of playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for human ends, it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that are non-human in so far as they are exclusive.\n\nThis state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also helps define the peculiar problem of present education. The school cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions. But it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions. And just here the true conceptions of interest and discipline are full of significance. Persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of academic and aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely \"practical\" practice. Organizing education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully enlisted in doing something while seeing to it that the doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve social conditions. To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time. But this is not a reason for nominally accepting one educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to another. It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it persistently.', '', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13661', '', '', '2023-05-07 14:50:30', '2023-05-07 14:50:30', '', 13658, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/reply/13661/', 3, 'reply', '', 0),
(13662, 1, '2023-05-10 11:08:16', '2023-05-10 11:08:16', 'Reasons Why Effective Lesson Plan Is Important\nEffective lesson planning contributes a lot to successful learning outcomes for students in several ways. The following are ways in which well-designed lesson plans add value to the teaching and learning outcomes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>A well-designed lesson plan helps students and teachers understand the goals of an instructional module</li>\n 	<li>It allows the teacher to translate the curriculum into learning activities</li>\n 	<li>It aligns the instructional materials with the assessment</li>\n 	<li>It ligns the assessment with the learning goal</li>\n 	<li>A well-designed lesson plan helps assure that the needed instructional materials are available</li>\n 	<li>It enables the teacher to thoughtfully address individual learning needs among students</li>\n</ul>', 'The Importance of A Well-Designed Lesson Plan', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'the-importance-of-a-well-designed-lesson-plan', '', '', '2023-05-10 11:25:42', '2023-05-10 11:25:42', '', 13418, 'https://teachers.com.ng/forums/topic/the-importance-of-a-well-designed-lesson-plan/', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13663, 1, '2023-05-10 11:25:42', '2023-05-10 11:25:42', 'Reasons Why Effective Lesson Plan Is Important\nEffective lesson planning contributes a lot to successful learning outcomes for students in several ways. The following are ways in which well-designed lesson plans add value to the teaching and learning outcomes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>A well-designed lesson plan helps students and teachers understand the goals of an instructional module</li>\n 	<li>It allows the teacher to translate the curriculum into learning activities</li>\n 	<li>It aligns the instructional materials with the assessment</li>\n 	<li>It ligns the assessment with the learning goal</li>\n 	<li>A well-designed lesson plan helps assure that the needed instructional materials are available</li>\n 	<li>It enables the teacher to thoughtfully address individual learning needs among students</li>\n</ul>', 'The Importance of A Well-Designed Lesson Plan', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13662-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-05-10 11:25:42', '2023-05-10 11:25:42', '', 13662, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13663', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13666, 1, '2023-05-10 22:42:03', '2023-05-10 22:42:03', 'https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/perfmatters-v2.1.0.zip', 'perfmatters-v2.1.0.zip', '', 'private', 'open', 'closed', '', 'perfmatters-v2-1-0-zip', '', '', '2023-05-10 22:42:03', '2023-05-10 22:42:03', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/perfmatters-v2.1.0.zip', 0, 'attachment', '', 0),
(13667, 18, '2023-05-11 13:09:38', '2023-05-11 13:09:38', 'Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student named Oyinkansola Kayode.\r\n\r\n<img class=\" wp-image-13669 aligncenter\" src=\"https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/teacher-beat-300x248.jpg\" alt=\"Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student\" width=\"235\" height=\"194\" />\r\n\r\nShe appears in front of Magistrate E. Kubenje on one count of assault.\r\n\r\nThe defendant committed the offence on March 28, 2023, according to police prosecutor Ajayi Kehinde, a deputy superintendent of police (SP).\r\n\r\nThe indictment said that Aderonke Makinde had assaulted a 9-year-old girl named Oyinkansola Kayode by caning her on March 28, 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the Lagos Magisterial District.\r\n\r\nThe charge read that Aderonke Makinde, on 28th March 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the <a class=\"tag-body\" href=\"https://ng.opera.news/tags/lagos-magisterial\">Lagos</a> Magisterial District had assaulted one Oyinkansola Kayode, 9-year-old by flogging her with a cane, an offence that contravenes Section 172 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.\r\n\r\nThe teacher pleaded not guilty to the charge. The defendant was granted a bail in the sum of N50,000 with one surety.', 'A Teacher Charged to Court for Beating A Nine Years Old Pupil', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'open', '', 'a-teacher-charged-to-court-for-beating-a-nine-years-old-pupil', '', '', '2023-05-11 17:25:34', '2023-05-11 17:25:34', '', 13578, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?post_type=topic&#038;p=13667', 0, 'topic', '', 0),
(13669, 1, '2023-05-11 17:13:49', '2023-05-11 17:13:49', '', 'teacher beat', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'closed', '', 'teacher-beat', '', '', '2023-05-11 17:16:58', '2023-05-11 17:16:58', '', 13667, 'https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/teacher-beat.jpg', 0, 'attachment', 'image/jpeg', 0),
(13670, 1, '2023-05-11 17:24:59', '2023-05-11 17:24:59', 'Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student named Oyinkansola Kayode.\n\n<img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13669 aligncenter\" src=\"https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/teacher-beat-300x248.jpg\" alt=\"Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student\" width=\"300\" height=\"248\" />\n\nShe appears in front of Magistrate E. Kubenje on one count of assault.\n\nThe defendant committed the offence on March 28, 2023, according to police prosecutor Ajayi Kehinde, a deputy superintendent of police (SP).\n\nThe indictment said that Aderonke Makinde had assaulted a 9-year-old girl named Oyinkansola Kayode by caning her on March 28, 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the Lagos Magisterial District.\n\nThe charge read that Aderonke Makinde, on 28th March 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the <a class=\"tag-body\" href=\"https://ng.opera.news/tags/lagos-magisterial\">Lagos</a> Magisterial District had assaulted one Oyinkansola Kayode, 9-year-old by flogging her with a cane, an offence that contravenes Section 172 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.\n\nThe teacher pleaded not guilty to the charge. The defendant was granted a bail in the sum of N50,000 with one surety.', 'A Teacher Charged to Court for Beating A Nine Years Old Pupil', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13667-autosave-v1', '', '', '2023-05-11 17:24:59', '2023-05-11 17:24:59', '', 13667, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13670', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13671, 1, '2023-05-11 17:18:00', '2023-05-11 17:18:00', 'Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student named Oyinkansola Kayode.\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13669 aligncenter\" src=\"https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/teacher-beat-300x248.jpg\" alt=\"Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student\" width=\"300\" height=\"248\" />\r\n\r\nShe appears in front of Magistrate E. Kubenje on one count of assault.\r\n\r\nThe defendant committed the offence on March 28, 2023, according to police prosecutor Ajayi Kehinde, a deputy superintendent of police (SP).\r\n\r\nThe indictment said that Aderonke Makinde had assaulted a 9-year-old girl named Oyinkansola Kayode by caning her on March 28, 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the Lagos Magisterial District.\r\n\r\nThe charge read that Aderonke Makinde, on 28th March 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the <a class=\"tag-body\" href=\"https://ng.opera.news/tags/lagos-magisterial\">Lagos</a> Magisterial District had assaulted one Oyinkansola Kayode, 9-year-old by flogging her with a cane, an offence that contravenes Section 172 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.\r\n\r\nThe teacher pleaded not guilty to the charge. The defendant was granted a bail in the sum of N50,000 with one surety.', 'A Teacher Charged to Court for Beating A Nine Years Old Pupil', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13667-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-05-11 17:18:00', '2023-05-11 17:18:00', '', 13667, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13671', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13672, 1, '2023-05-11 17:25:34', '2023-05-11 17:25:34', 'Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student named Oyinkansola Kayode.\r\n\r\n<img class=\" wp-image-13669 aligncenter\" src=\"https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/teacher-beat-300x248.jpg\" alt=\"Aderonke Makinde, a 35-year-old teacher employed at Westgate Land Emperial Creche, Nursery and Primary School, was charged in the Mushin district of Lagos State after allegedly using a cane to beat a 9-year-old student\" width=\"235\" height=\"194\" />\r\n\r\nShe appears in front of Magistrate E. Kubenje on one count of assault.\r\n\r\nThe defendant committed the offence on March 28, 2023, according to police prosecutor Ajayi Kehinde, a deputy superintendent of police (SP).\r\n\r\nThe indictment said that Aderonke Makinde had assaulted a 9-year-old girl named Oyinkansola Kayode by caning her on March 28, 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the Lagos Magisterial District.\r\n\r\nThe charge read that Aderonke Makinde, on 28th March 2023, at the school located at No. 1 Okesanya Street, Papa-Ajao, Mushin, Lagos State in the <a class=\"tag-body\" href=\"https://ng.opera.news/tags/lagos-magisterial\">Lagos</a> Magisterial District had assaulted one Oyinkansola Kayode, 9-year-old by flogging her with a cane, an offence that contravenes Section 172 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.\r\n\r\nThe teacher pleaded not guilty to the charge. The defendant was granted a bail in the sum of N50,000 with one surety.', 'A Teacher Charged to Court for Beating A Nine Years Old Pupil', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13667-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-05-11 17:25:34', '2023-05-11 17:25:34', '', 13667, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13672', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(13673, 1, '2023-05-11 19:13:00', '2023-05-11 19:13:00', '', 'proud teacher', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'closed', '', 'proud-teacher-2', '', '', '2023-05-11 19:13:00', '2023-05-11 19:13:00', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/proud-teacher.png', 0, 'attachment', 'image/png', 0),
(13674, 1, '2023-05-11 19:40:16', '2023-05-11 19:40:16', '', 'proud teacher', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'closed', '', 'proud-teacher-3', '', '', '2023-05-11 19:40:16', '2023-05-11 19:40:16', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/proud-teacher.jpg', 0, 'attachment', 'image/jpeg', 0),
(13675, 1, '2023-05-11 19:40:30', '2023-05-11 19:40:30', '', 'proud teacher', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'closed', '', 'proud-teacher-4', '', '', '2023-05-11 19:40:30', '2023-05-11 19:40:30', '', 0, 'https://teachers.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/proud-teacher-1.jpg', 0, 'attachment', 'image/jpeg', 0),
(13680, 1, '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '', 'Parents Teachers Forum', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'open', '', 'parents-teachers-forum', '', '', '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '', 3592, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?post_type=forum&#038;p=13680', 0, 'forum', '', 0),
(13681, 1, '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '', 'Parents Teachers Forum', '', 'inherit', 'closed', 'closed', '', '13680-revision-v1', '', '', '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '2023-05-21 19:51:09', '', 13680, 'https://teachers.com.ng/?p=13681', 0, 'revision', '', 0);
