Democracy and Education · Chapter
XX: Intellectual and Practical Studies explained
This chapter examines the historical opposition between intellectual and practical studies, tracing it from Plato and Aristotle through medieval philosophy to modern empiricism.
What happens
This chapter examines the historical opposition between intellectual and practical studies, tracing it from Plato and Aristotle through medieval philosophy to modern empiricism. Dewey argues that this dichotomy stems from social conditions that separated leisure from labor, and that modern experimental science and changes in social life have undermined it. He advocates for an education that integrates knowing and doing, where practical activities are intellectualized and serve as instruments for learning.
Themes in this chapter
Unity of Knowledge and Action
Dewey argues that the traditional separation of knowing and doing is artificial, and that genuine knowledge arises from active engagement with the environment.
Experience and Learning by Doing
The chapter emphasizes that experience consists of active relations between a person and their surroundings, and that schooling should use selected activities to guide learning.
Critique of Traditional Curriculum
Dewey critiques the historical preference for 'intellectual' studies over practical ones, rooted in social class distinctions and outdated views of knowledge.
Characters to notice
- Plato
Plato is cited for his identification of experience with practical concerns and reason with higher, spiritual knowledge, and for his view that philosophers should rule based on rational intelligence.
- Aristotle
Aristotle is mentioned alongside Plato as agreeing that experience is tied to practical, material interests while reason deals with eternal truth.
- Francis Bacon
Bacon is referenced as a modern reformer who advocated appealing to experience to break away from authority and preconceived notions, emphasizing observation over dogma.
- John Locke
Locke is noted as the most influential empiricist, whose sensationalism was mitigated by recognition of mental faculties that organize sensory material.
Key passages
“The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has a long history.”
The idea that knowledge comes from a more elevated origin than practical work, and is more valuable and spiritual, has been around for a long time.
Introduces the historical bias favoring intellectual over practical pursuits.
“Experience lost the practical meaning which it had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and cognitive.”
Experience no longer referred to active engagement with the world, but instead came to be seen as a purely mental and cognitive process.
Describes the shift in the meaning of experience in modern philosophy.
“It is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment of activity into one of cramped study of the records of other men’s learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance activities into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning.”
The school's role is not to move students from active life to passive study of others' knowledge, but to shift them from random activities to carefully chosen ones that promote learning.
Dewey's core argument for an activity-based, guided educational environment.