Democracy and Education · Chapter
The Nature of Realization or Appreciation explained
This chapter explores the distinction between direct, appreciative experience and indirect, symbolic or representative experience in education.
What happens
This chapter explores the distinction between direct, appreciative experience and indirect, symbolic or representative experience in education. Dewey argues that genuine appreciation—a 'realizing sense' of meaning—is essential for learning, and that it is a mistake to confine appreciation to the fine arts. He emphasizes the role of imagination as the medium of appreciation in all fields, and warns against the danger of symbols and techniques becoming ends in themselves, divorced from direct experience. The chapter also discusses how working standards of value are formed through personal appreciation, not through the mere learning of external rules.
Themes in this chapter
Experience and Learning by Doing
Dewey emphasizes that direct, personal experience is the foundation for genuine appreciation and understanding, contrasting it with indirect, symbolic learning.
Critique of Traditional Curriculum
The chapter criticizes the tendency to treat appreciation as confined to literature and fine arts, and the overemphasis on external discipline, marks, and rewards at the expense of life situations that bring meaning home.
Environment and Indirect Education
Dewey discusses how symbols and language mediate indirect experience, and the danger that such representative forms may become detached from direct appreciation, leading to mere bookishness.
Key passages
“It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself.”
Dewey argues that appreciation is not limited to the arts but is fundamental to all educational experiences.
Highlights the broad scope of appreciation in education.
“The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical.”
Imagination is essential for genuine appreciation and prevents learning from becoming rote or mechanical.
Emphasizes the central role of imagination in all learning.
“In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations.”
A person's actual standards of value are shaped by their own direct experiences of significance, not by what they are taught to profess.
Distinguishes between genuine and merely verbal standards of value.