Democracy and Education · Chapter
III: Science or Rationalized Knowledge explained
This chapter defines science as the perfected outcome of learning, characterized by methodical inquiry and testing rather than mere organization of facts.
What happens
This chapter defines science as the perfected outcome of learning, characterized by methodical inquiry and testing rather than mere organization of facts. It contrasts scientific knowledge with opinion, guesswork, and tradition, emphasizing the need for disciplined reflection and experimental verification. The chapter warns against natural tendencies toward credulity and premature acceptance, and argues that science provides the best tools for effective reflection, though its abstractness can make it remote from ordinary experience. It concludes that the mark of science is the kind of organization achieved through adequate methods of tested discovery, where conceptions mutually imply and support one another.
Themes in this chapter
Experience and Learning by Doing
The chapter emphasizes that subject matter and ideas must be tested experimentally, and that science provides methods for conducting reflection under tested conditions.
Critique of Traditional Curriculum
The chapter critiques the presentation of ready-made scientific information in instruction, warning that it can be even more dangerous than other forms of information when isolated from ordinary experience.
Unity of Knowledge and Action
The chapter argues that scientific knowledge is organized with specific reference to the successful conduct of discovery, linking knowing as a specialized undertaking to practical inquiry.
Characters to notice
Key passages
“Science is a name for knowledge in its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected outcome of learning—its consummation.”
Science is the term for knowledge at its most typical and complete, representing the highest achievement of learning.
Dewey establishes science as the ideal form of knowledge.
“Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection.”
Without being introduced to the scientific mindset, a person lacks the most effective instruments humanity has created for guiding thoughtful inquiry.
Dewey emphasizes the essential role of scientific method in education.
“The more one emphasizes organization as a mark of science, then, the more he is committed to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition of science. For method defines the kind of organization in virtue of which science is science.”
The more we stress organization as a characteristic of science, the more we must acknowledge that method is primary in defining science, because it is method that determines the specific type of organization that makes science what it is.
Dewey argues that method, not mere organization, is the essence of science.