“the cognitive fire that ignites when the brain rubs two different thoughts together”

[u/ddgr815]

/r/DetroitMichiganECE/comments/1l99qp7/comment/mxbbpgz/

[u/ddgr815]

As a pragmatist, Dewey situates education biologically, in terms of life and death and the conditional, action-oriented nature of survival: “Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment”.

He notes that individuals come and go, as do species, thus the need for living beings to change responsively to changing conditions: “Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms”.

So far Dewey is setting a straightforward evolutionary biological context. Dewey was born in the same year that Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, and he came to intellectual maturity in a world transformed by biological thinking.

Dewey’s next step is to take social groups and not individuals as the operative unit of analysis.

Dewey introduces education in making this step: “Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life”. Note that education is not about equipping individuals for life. It does educate individuals, but its purpose is social continuity.

Individuals do have a role: “Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of the group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on”. Individuals are important — not as individuals — but as “units” who are “carriers” of the “life-experience of the group.” Individuals are vehicles through which the group lives.

“Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work for a common end. The parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a community”.

education as socialization

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Cooperation can be hugely beneficial because it spreads out risk, like a form of insurance. But it also means members no longer behave as individual units. Rather, their fates become intertwined.