Educational Implications

> Photo 6.2 The students in the pragmatist mode are engaged in interdisciplinary collaborative group interaction.

Birgit Koch/Fotosonline/Alamy Limited

Following the scientific method, experimentalist logic is inductive rather than deduced from first principles as in idealism and realism. Any claim to truth is a warranted assertion that is tentative and subject to further testing and revision.

6-4c Educational implications

Rather than transmit subject matters of allegedly permanent truths, pragmatists are concerned with the process of constructing, using, and testing ideas. For pragmatists, education is an experimental process—a method of solving problems that challenges people as they interact with their world. For Dewey, the most intelligent and reflective way of solving problems is to use the scientific method.

Pragmatists favor interdisciplinary education rather than a departmentalized subject-matter curriculum (Photo 6.2). When you face a problem, pragmatists say, you find the information needed to solve it from many sources, not from a single academic subject. For example, to define the problem of global warming and suggest ways of solving it, we need to use information that comes from historical, political, sociological, scientific, and technological sources. A pragmatically educated person knows how to research and apply information from multiple sources to the problem. In contrast, idealists and realists strongly disagree because they believe students must first acquire a knowledge base by studying and mastering organized subjects before they can use applied interdisciplinary approaches.

Pragmatists such as Dewey see the school as a local community of learners and teachers intimately connected to the larger society. The school exercises three major functions: to simplify, purify, and balance the cultural heritage. To simplify, teachers select cultural, political, and economic elements in the society and reduce their complexity to units appropriate to learners’ readiness, interest, and prior experience. To purify, they select valuable cultural elements such as collaboration and eliminate those such as bullying that limit human interaction and growth. To balance, the school helps learners integrate their experiences so that it is personally and socially meaningful.

In a pluralistic multicultural society, the pragmatic school provides experiences that encourage children of one culture to understand and appreciate members of other