國立臺灣大學哲學論評

Abstract /

As Dewey came to Chicago in 1894, there were many conflicts of educational thoughts in the academic world. With Hegelian dialectic, Dewey has synthesized successfully the antithesis of the viewpoint of the individual and that of the society, the emphasis on the subject matter of the curriculum and that on lthe contents of the child`s own experience. The teaching methods of "pouring in" and "drawing out "are shown to be both justified and equally one-sided. With functional analysis, the conflict of the theory of amusement and that of effort can be synthesized dialectically by a theory of genuine interest. Dewey puts constructive activities as unifying center of all curricula and contends that the genuine interest consists in the interpretability of the subject matter for child or the adaptability of the child`s impulses, habits and experience to the new environment. Dewey reinterpreted the evolutionary method as a genetic or historic method and applied it, being methodically different from Hegelian dialectic, but in the same spirit of harmonious unification as the Hegelian dialectic, to solve the conflict of new education and old education by removal or reform of the institutional conditions.