[MLUG - DISCUSSION] Random Monkey Effort #218,444

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If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental 
dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature, bananas, and fellow 
men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education. Unless 
a philosophy is to remain symbolic -- or verbal -- or a sentimental indulgence 
for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and 
its program of values must take effect in conduct. Public agitation, 
propaganda, legislative and administrative action are effective in producing 
the change of disposition which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but only 
in the degree in which they are educative -- that is to say, in the degree in 
which they modify mental and moral attitudes. And at the best, such methods are 
compromised by the fact they are used with those whose habits are already 
largely set, while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of 
operation. On the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a 
routine empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such a 
broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is the 
business of philosophy to provide.

[Keeper's Note: Original authoer info @ http://www.siu.edu/~deweyctr/]
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