(DOWNLOAD) "John Dewey and the New Definition of Individual Responsibility (Article 9) (Report)" by American Education History Journal * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: John Dewey and the New Definition of Individual Responsibility (Article 9) (Report)
- Author : American Education History Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 209 KB
Description
One of the most difficult areas of Dewey's thought to understand is that which deals with individual responsibility and development. As one of the leaders of the Progressive Movement in education, he was heavily identified, sometimes incorrectly, with the doctrines of individualism at the root of this movement. As Lawrence Cremin pointed out in The Transformation of the School, he was also attacked by critics who saw his stress on social morality as a threat to the concept of individualism as it was then understood (Cremin 1964, 126). This paper will attempt to understand why Dewey's view of individualism could be viewed in both a positive and negative manner. In order to do this, it is important to consider why his view of individualism was "new" in the first part of the 20th century in the United States and how it impacted educational thought. In Democracy and Education, Dewey wrote that "In both the Greek and medieval periods, the rule was to regard the individual as a channel through which a universal and divine intelligence operated. The individual was in no true sense the knower; the knower was the 'Reason' which operated through him" (Dewey 1916, 292). He went on to explain the religious individualism of the medieval period "where the deepest concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul" (Ibid.). Dewey believed, however, that this view of individualism began to change "with the rise of economic and political individualism after the sixteenth century, and, with the development of Protestantism, the times were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the individual in achieving knowledge for himself" (Ibid.).
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