Logic and the educative process

Abstract

The conception of education as process, as an activity of meditation and reflection, is no doubt a fruitful conception; for it puts emphasis upon the activities of doing and making, and lends itself to the problem method and the experience curriculum. But without an adequate metaphysic of the educative process, reason becomes submerged beneath the floodwaters of doing and making, while knowledge is reduced to behavior, learning to doing, and morals to mere animal interest or dialectic intent. The crisis in education rests on the ambiguous metaphysics of pure activity or process, while philosophy is betrayed by the cleavage between logical and empirical truth. In its genesis and natural history, reflection arises out of the direct struggle of man and nature, of the philosophic subject and the philosophic object; out of antecedent confusion, doubt, and uncertainty, and into consequent clarity, certainty, and truth. But the relation between these two poles, in which thought meditates as a third term, is a casual one, mutually determining both subject and object, man and nature. Logical necessity, in its original grounds and genesis, arises out of the same occasion as casual necessity, so that the distinction between logical and casual necessity, by virtue of the separation of the subject and object in concrete living, soon develops into the absolute metaphysical dualism of logical and empirical truth. Now this is the dualism which contributes to the moral and intellectual uncertainty of our times; and which, through the varied contributions of radical empiricism and logical positivism, forms the underlying philosophic foundation of the current crisis in education.