Pragmatic Naturalism: An Introduction

19. Ideals and Goals of Education

PRAGMATIC NATURALISM 196 19. Ideals and Goals of Education Human beings are goal-seeking in many of their activitiesj the ability to construct ends-in-view and to move toward the accomplishment of some of these goals is a distinguishing mark of the species. The pursuit and achievement of goals gives meaning and purpose to living. Behavior that is not goal-directed is impulsive, or it is a matter of routine habit. Specific goals grow out of specific problematic situations , and they are unique in that they occur in particular times and places. Kinds of situations recur, howeverj thus there emerge ends or goals which are generic to past and present experience. General goals have a cumulative force persisting from the pastj they occupy attention in the present , and they become imag.inative ideals demanding actualization . Since the emergence of purposes, goals, and ideals is integral to the pragmatic naturalists' metaphysics of experience , and since education taken broadly is a transmission of that experience to succeeding generations, then it follows that ideals and goals are central to their philosophy of education . Goals are narrow or broad in scope depending upon the problems with which they deal. The end-in-view which a person carries in the mind when moving on a continuous route from home tq office may be viewed as a practical and somewhat limited goaL The end-in-view or goal a person has in mapping out a career is much broader, involves contributory activities and goals, and stretches across many areas of experience. There are still other goals which belong to human life as a species. These comprehensive goals cut EDUCATION 197 across broad areas of experience, and they are the guiding ideals of human life; they are abstract and general in the sense that they are not tied down to any immediate time and space, but they are not abstract in the sense that they are unrelated to all concrete experience. If the term "ultimate" be allowed interpretation in this sense, then pragmatic naturalists hold that there are ultimate goals or ideals with which philosophy and education are concerned, and there are proximate goals which are more immediate in their demands and more concrete and empirical in their contents. For the pragmatic naturalists one of the most important ideals of education is the intellectual ideal. They hold that one of the foremost functions of education is to teach a child how to think, how to inquire, and how to formulate judgments . Dewey says that with the development of "methods of controlling investigation and controlling reflection, the intellectual ideal can and must in the long run change more and more from one of information to one of ability to use the methods of inquiry and verification."12 As experiences of human beings accumulate, there is a multiplication of studies. The teacher finds himself overwhelmed by the vast accumulation of information, and there is an increased need for some principle of unity and simplification if the amalgamated mass of subject studies is not to fall into disorganization or crumble under its own weight. There is an important place for subject matters in the curriculum, as will be shown later. The primary emphasis, however, is upon science as an attitude of mind and as a method of inquiry. For Dewey it is not enough that a child know the accumulated achievements of past inquiries; the important thing is that the child learn to inquire for himself. Dewey thinks that the steadying and centralizing factor in education is the attitude of mind and habit of thought which we call "scientific." Encouragement of an inquiring mind in each child may seem a tremendous task to a teacher engaged in day-to-day activities of keeping a group of PRAGMATIC NATURALISM 198 youngsters occupied and busyj but Dewey believes that there is an important connection between the early impulses of children and the refined disciplines of scientific investigators . The child has curiosity, imagination, and a love for experimentation which are akin to the same attitudes of the mature scientist. The early impulses of children are random, however, and may develop into habits of perception which are lacking in sustained attentioUj this may lead to hasty, heedless, impatient glancing over the surfaces of things. These early impulses may turn into haphazard guessing, into what may be called a grasshopper-type mind, flitting from one stimulus to another. Thus habits of credulity...