perimentation which is required in every field of life.
PRAGMATISM AND EDUCATIVE PROCESS
Activity lies at the centre of all educative process. The basis of all teaching is the activity of the child, says Foster. Every continuous- experience or activity is educative and all education, is fact, resides in having such experience. But continuous growth in experience is not the whole education. Education is something more. It is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. Pragmatism approaches the problems of education from the ‘progressivits’ view point “progress implies change. Change further implies novelty”, so education cannot be conceived of as acquired once for all. Problem solving is at the core of all education. The educative process thus becomes empirical, experimental, and piecemeal: in a word pragmatic.
1. EDUCATION AS LIFE-
Pragmatists firmly believe that old and traditional education is dead and lifeless. Education is a continuous re-organizing, reconstructing and integrating the experience and activities of race. They want to conserve the worthwhile culture of the past, think out the solutions to meet the new situations and then integrate the two. Real knowledge can be gained only be activity, experiments and real life experiences.
2. EDUCATION AS GROWTH-
Thus education will be useful if it brings about the growth and development of the individual as well as the society in which he lives. Education is meant for the child and child is not meant for education and child is not empty bottle to be filled up by outside knowledge. Each child is born with inherent capacities, tendencies and aptitudes which are drawn out and developed by education. One of the aims of education is to develop all the inherent capacities of the child to the fullest extent.
3. EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS-
To pragmatism, man is a social being. He gains more and more knowledge through personal experiences than he gets from books. According to pragmatism, the education of the child should be through the medium of society so that develops in him socially desirable qualities which promote his welfare and happiness. John Dewey rightly speaks out – Education is the social continuity of life.
4. EDUCATION A CONTINUOUS RESTRUCTURING OF EXPERIENCE-
Education is a process of development. Knowledge is gained by experiences and experiments, conducted by the learner himself. One exercise leads to another and so on and the area of knowledge is widened by the child. The process of reconstruction of experience goes on and leads to adjustment and development of personality. For pragmatists educational process has no end beyond itself. In addition to the individual it is continuous reorganizing restructuring and integrating the experience and activities of the race.
5. EDUCATION THE RESPONSIBILITY OF STATE-
Education is the birth right of each individual and may not be within the right of the individual, so the state should shoulder the responsibility. The refusal of the state to do so may not lead the nation to suffering. It is for the state to make the child capable and confident to meet the problems and challenges of life successfully.
AIMS AND PRAGMATISM
Pragmatists do not believe in any pre-conceived aims of education. Aims cannot be conceived of as final, fixed and immutable. Aims arise out of the ongoing experience and should lie wholly within the child’s experience. Living as we do, in a changing world with an uncertain and shifting future, human experience is prone to change. And so the need to reshape our aims to meet the needs of such a dynamic environment as ours has become where the invention of every machine means a new social revolution. So it has been said that education has no aims. “Continuing education “, says a UNESCO booklet, “has become a necessity in almost every field of life from housekeeping to atomics”. Education is a lifelong process and not as something to discipline the recalcitrant person in to conformity with the pre-existing truth. The pupil should be able to, as they say, ’thing through’ the problems. Education