Philosophical principles of pragmatism in education

Pragmatism as a philosophy of education has only come into its own in the very late nineteenth and the twentieth century's. This is largely due to the work of a number of educational philosophies such as William Heard Kilpatrick, Boyd Bode, and George Counts. Because reality changes, whatever works will also change-thus, truth must also be changeable and no one can claim to possess any final or ultimate truth. In other word, pragmatism is the philosophy that encourages us to seek out the processes and do things that work best to help us achieve desirable ends. Several true reasons for this to happened is because the weight of the customs and tradition, fear and apathy, and the fact that habitual ways of thinking and doing seem to work even though they have lost use in today's world. One important element of this tradition is the development of world-view with regards to scientific revolution. The background of pragmatism can be found in the works of such people like Francis Bacon and John Locke. For Dewey, a democratic society must be mobile and dynamic; it is a society in which teachers know that what works for one student might not work for another. He believed that experience is not a mental state that is within us; instead, we are within experience. For Dewey, a democratic society is not one that makes provisions for equal participation in its good for all its members. This kind of society involves flexible readjustments of its institutions through interactions among the different forms of life. According to pragmatism the theory and practice of education is based on two main principles, viz: Education should have a social function, and Education should provide real-life experience to the child.

کلیدواژه ها:

Pragmatism ، Philosophy ، Education ، Dewey