Democracy and Education · Chapter
The Environment as Directive explained
This chapter explores the concept of direction, control, and guidance in education, emphasizing that true direction involves assisting natural capacities rather than imposing external force.
What happens
This chapter explores the concept of direction, control, and guidance in education, emphasizing that true direction involves assisting natural capacities rather than imposing external force. Dewey argues that control is not about subordinating antisocial impulses but about guiding activity toward its own ends, focusing and ordering responses. He stresses that external direction is impossible without the individual's cooperation and warns against shortsighted control that disrupts sequential development.
Themes in this chapter
Environment and Indirect Education
The environment provides stimuli that direct activity, but the individual's existing tendencies determine the response, illustrating indirect education through environmental influence.
Experience and Learning by Doing
Direction involves focusing and ordering actions in response to stimuli, akin to learning through doing, as seen in the bicycle example where superfluous movements are eliminated.
Key passages
“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.”
Control is essentially a stronger form of direction, including self-regulation as well as external guidance.
Dewey redefines control as cooperative direction rather than coercion.
“In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human nature.”
Strictly speaking, you cannot force anything onto individuals; ignoring this distorts human nature.
Emphasizes the necessity of recognizing the individual's active role in learning.