PHILOSOPHY OF PRAGMATISM IN EDUCATION

“We do not learn from experience.

We learn from reflection on experience.”
John Dewey

Pragmatism has become a leading educational philosophy in America. It has given education a
primary and central place among social institutions. Most notable human figure is John Dewey. He
established his Laboratory School in Chicago before his major writing was done. His writings marked the
emergence of progressive education in the world.

The root of the word of pragmatism is a Greek word meaning “work”. It is a philosophy that
encourages us to seek out the processes and do the things that work best to help us achieve desirable
ends. The general thrust of pragmatism is toward a heightened sensitivity to consequences as the final
test for thought, but it is by no means insensitive to principles. Human experience is an important
ingredient of pragmatic philosophy.

Education as a Social Institution. The primary concern of education is for social function.
Pragmatism approaches education as first and foremost a social phenomenon. It is a means by which
society renews itself; and is a process which in its inner essence is social, embracing individuals who,
while they are separate and distinct physical and psychical entities, are at the same time society cast
into individual forms.

Education should and must be informal, going on outside of institution, but since this is not the
case, society must have an institution whose singular reason for existence is to carry learning activities
forward. Yet within formal institutions education must remain informal in character and in touch with
society, constituting throughout a process of social renewal. There are three reasons why school must
exist as distinct institution of the society, namely: (1) the school would be necessary to supply the
volume of learning each new generation needs. “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s,
we rob them of tomorrow.”
Children simply have to know more than they can learn from informal and unintended learning
experiences which daily life in society provides. (2) The complexity of modern life is such that we cannot
depend upon that alone which is near at hand for the extent of our resources. We must draw upon
experience that is remote---remote both in time and in place. (3) the heritage of the past may function
fruitfully in the present. The large part of the heritage of the past that is available has been preserved in
writing, and children must therefore achieve a command of language in order to make use of it.

Society cannot fulfill the educational task without an institution designed for this purpose. But
the school must remain intimate relation with society if its true role is to be played well. In fact its main
function stem from this relationship. (1) Being a specialized institution designed for a particular purpose
it can be simple, whereas society is unavoidable complex. It can represent society to the child in a
simplified form which makes learning possible, whereas the child might never get beyond confusion if
confronted only by the complexity of society as it is. (2) The school can also be selective in a qualitative,
if not ethical, manner as it represents society to the young. There are aspects of society as it actually is
which are unworthy, which mislead and provide a wrong kind of education when impressionable youth
are exposed to them. The school however is in a position to exercise value judgments in representing
society. It can choose those kinds of social experience which are conducive to wholesome nature and
exclude those which are not. (3) A third element in the relation of the school to society is that it has the
responsibility of giving the child a balanced and genuinely representative acquaintance with society at
the same time that it simplifies and purifies this acquaintance. It must not become the agent of some
segment of society as over against another. It cannot be narrow or parochial in showing favor toward
sectionalism, nationalism, a limited cultural perspective; it must not encourage class distinctions. This is
to hint strongly at the place democracy has as an essential internal spirit in education. Children are not
likely to get a balanced representative with society unless the spirit and approach of their schools are
democratic.

The Pupil. They are distinct and concrete centers of experience who must be guided so that
they will be reasonably at home in the all-embracing flow of which they are a part. There is the
biological aspect of pupil. When students come to school they must bring their body with them. They
are active organisms, partaking of the same kind of movement as constitutes the dynamic world of
which they are a part. No passive receivers, waiting for impressions to be made upon them, they are
ever and always reaching out to engage in the flow of experience.

Then, there are also psychological and sociological aspects of the pupils. He is not only a
biological organism, he is an organism that participates in meanings and therefore has value experiences
which animals do not have.

The Objectives of Education. The general objective of education is more than education. By
this it is meant that every consummation of a learning episode is a means to new learning which find
their consummation in succeeding experiences. The specific purpose of education, then is to give the
learner experience in effective experiencing. Of all the professions that require a “long look ahead,” that
of the educator makes it most imperative. One of his perennial concerns must be “connectedness in
growth.” In trying to give form to the education of the new generation it is exceedingly important that
full attention be given to the internal factors of experience. By internal factors is meant those ways in
which the individual or grouped is involved in interaction with the situations through which they live. It
is both inadequate and superficial to take seriously external factors only. This is to assume that human
beings are within situations only in the spatial sense, as it were, of being inside them. Their within-ness
is much more subtle than this. And this insight reveals how external and lacking in psychological
penetration the older education has been.

It also has important bearing upon the kind of experiences which is assumed will move toward
the desired objectives; namely, these inside them. Their within-ness is much more subtle than this. And
this insight reveals how external and lacking in psychological penetration the older education has been.
It also has important bearing upon the kind of experiences which is assumed will move toward the
desired objectives; namely, these experiences cannot be judged externally alone but must be viewed
primarily in the light of their internal connections.

While it may have been well intentioned for the older education to emphasize preparation for
the future, this also brought a narrowing of perspective which was detrimental to its best intention. The
way to prepare for the future is to draw out fully from the present experience all there is in it of value
for the learning subject at the time that he has it.

It is accordingly not to be assumed that objectives, certainly for each concrete learning situation,
can be determined by the teacher without any reference to what is it that the learners desire for
themselves? Students have objectives as well as teachers. More than this, if they are to participate
wholeheartedly in the purposes which direct their learning activities, they must be given the privileged
of participating in the formation of these purposes.

Freedom of activities in learning is not to be misinterpreted as freedom to act upon the impulse
or immediate desires which the learner may happen to have. Freedom involves the selection of
activities which have a longer-term value than the expression of impulse.

The Educative Process. Learning, like thinking never begins from a static lag line; it always
begins in the midst of movement and activity. At whatever point an outside observer might enter a
situation in which learning is going on, whether it be a classroom or an informal play group, he will find
motion and activity. This is something the effective teacher will remember; he will realize that he must
always begin with experiences that are already going on. The first stage of the educative cycle may be
focused to constitute a problem or maybe a set of problems that are felt by the pupils. Teachers have to
help the students to examine the indeterminate elements intently enough to come to see the problem
or problems that they constitute. This is the early stage of learning which interests spring up.

Interests are not elements which are brought to learning either by teacher or pupil; they are not
a froth or foam which is churned up by clever teaching devices. They are rooted in the relation of the
student to the tensions of his experience, and are therefore more to be discovered by the teacher than
made by him. When a person has a problem, he is already interested because he is in a state of tension
that needs to be resolved, and his interest is attached to possible resolutions. This stage of the learning
cycle challenges the student’s powers of insight more than any other for at this point that new patterns
are born. The problem is felt; related data are brought together from within the situation and from
other comparable situations which have a close bearing upon the problem and its possible solution.

In any effective handling of the present, past experience is credited with great relevance in the
guidance of experience so that it will lead purposefully into a future of value and worth. The binding of
experience between the achievements of the past and the issues at the present is very important to
underscore. Acquaintance of the past is therefore an important part of learning because it may become
a potent instrumentality of dealing effectively with the future. The objectives of learning are in the
future and the immediate materials of learning are in the present.

The final stage of the learning experience, if these different developments in the learning
movement can be considered definite stages, is the stage of resolution in which the new hypothetical
patterns are put to the test of action. Those not proving to be effective resolutions are discarded; and
those by which the problem is found to unfold satisfactorily without jeopardizing later experiences are
allowed to stand.

A Reform in Education. Traditionally, education has been too formal; while it is necessary to be
formalized as a social institution, it has been not only unnecessary but also artificial for it to formalize
learning activity as much as it has. Pragmatism is a reaction and a revolt against formalism of education.
It is a revolt against coldly formalized teaching procedures. Here are the reactions of pragmatism to
formalism in education:

1. Cycle of learning is not so mechanical as to be segmented into departments, courses and

time schedules with a frozen rigidity.
 2. Formal education was wrongly an education of imposition, imposition from above and
outside the learner’s experience; imposition of adult standards; imposition of a set of
subject matter; and imposition of methods.
3. The old education was also a practice in which subject matter was the centrality. It was
contained in books and it was in the heads of the elders.

Formalized education is substituted with the expression and cultivation of individuality from
imposition from above. It is supplemented discipline with greater freedom of activities. It paralleled
learning from texts and teachers with learning through experience.

The Teacher. For pragmatism, learning begins in experience, a dictum that must always be
remembered by a teacher. The teacher is not the only decision-maker. The role of a teacher may be
approached from the analogy of the parent’s place in home. Families have probably always been more
informal in their structure than in school classes. He is a disciplinarian and a taskmaster. He has to keep
order in the class and must plan for learning activities.
The teacher is the member of the learning group who must assess the capacities and needs of
the students; and he must also arrange the conditions which provide the subject matter and content for
experiences that satisfy these needs and develop these capacities. He must respect the freedom of his
students. He loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group
activities.

Method. Creative and constructive projects also are heavily employed in this practice of
education. Many of them go on within the school, many of them beyond it, some of them individually
pursued, others common social efforts of the whole class, usually reaching out into the community.

Discussion will also have its place, for it constitutes a means by which group thinking can go on,
not only in the classroom but also in the life of the community. Its validity in the community is evidence
of its validity in formal learning that will be supplemented by research and discovery of certain facts,
probably outside the classroom.

Excursions beyond the classroom in a number of directions may bring in the needed facts.
Conventional laboratory works may be necessary, reference study in the library will yield its share, and
frequently actual visits to points away from the school will be made in order to observe certain
phenomena directly.