Table Of ContentEducational Theory As Theory of Conduct :
title:
From Aristotle to Dewey
author: Chambliss, J. J.
publisher: State University of New York Press
isbn10 | asin: 0887064647
print isbn13: 9780887064647
ebook isbn13: 9780585063331
language: English
Education--Philosophy--History, Education-
subject
-Aims and objectives, Conduct of life.
publication date: 1987
lcc: LB41.C49 1987eb
ddc: 370/.1
Education--Philosophy--History, Education-
subject:
-Aims and objectives, Conduct of life.
Page iii
Educational Theory
As
Theory of Conduct
From Aristotle to Dewey
J.J. Chambliss
State University of New York Press
Page iv
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1987 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations em-bodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York Press, State
University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chambliss, J.J. (Joseph James), 1929-
Educational theory as theory of conduct.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. EducationPhilosophyHistory. 2. Education
Aims and objectives. 3. Conduct of life. I. Title.
LB41.C49 1987 370'.1 86-14540
ISBN 0-88706-463-9
ISBN 0-88706-464-7 (pbk.)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Page v
Contents
PREFACE vii
1. Introduction 1
2. Aristotle's Predecessors 7
3. Aristotle's Poliscraft 23
4. Oratory as Conduct in Cicero and Quintilian 37
5. Conduct in Jewish and Christian Thought 47
6. John of Salisbury's Defense of the Arts 63
7. John Locke and Isaac Watts: Understanding as Conduct 71
8. Vico: Human Beings Make Themselves 87
9. Rousseau: Human Nature and the Necessity in Things 101
10. Condillac's Natural Logic 117
11. John Dewey: Empiricism and Humility in Conduct 125
12. Making Our Nature: A Necessity in Conduct 133
Notes 139
Bibliographic Note 165
Index 169
Page vii
Preface
This essay is in no sense an attempt to provide a comprehensive
history of educational theory from Aristotle to Dewey. Its aim is a
more modest one, to show the nature of an idea that has endured in
that history. The idea that educational theory is a theory of conduct is
one from which we cannot escape. Yet we neglect it all too often. We
ignore it when we try to direct education into paths laid out by
measures that quantify conduct, or when we use Graduate Record
Examination scores as a device to determine who should be educated.
Just because conduct is made of certainty and uncertainty, of
rationality and irrationality, of the measured and the immeasurable, it
resists efforts to settle its nature in terms of the certain, measured, and
rational. The certain, the measured, the rational are dimensions of
conduct which educate us, but they are not the only ones; the
uncertain, the irrational, and the immeasurable educate us also. Each
dimension has its limitations and its possibilities and needs to be taken
into account in determining what we do in educating ourselves. The
idea that educational theory is a theory of conduct is an argument
against scientism in its various forms. Conduct, like love, must find its
ways despite the efforts of scientism to computerize it or to fix the
stages through which it passes.
My chief intellectual debts are to the writers whose ideas make up the
Page viii
subject matter of the essay. There are other debts to acknowledge,
some of an intellectual kind, and some that are more personal. An
enormous debt is owed to students in the course "Educational
Classics," where the ideas in this essay have been presented,
developed, tolerated, and discussed. My friend and colleague, James
M. Giarelli, has been a sympathetic listener to the idea that
educational theory is a theory of conduct. Margaret Nolan helped in
the typing of an earlier draft. Sandra Chubrick typed the present
version. And Marie Bograd knows that she had a special part in it.
The material in two chapters follows closely articles already
published. My gratitude is to the editors of their respective journals
for permission to include the following: "Oratory as Conduct in
Cicero and Quintilian," Journal of the Midwest History of Education
Society, XIV (1986), 6878, is Chapter IV; and "The Educational
Significance of 'Nature' and 'Conduct' in Condillac's Logic,"
Paedagogica Historica, XVII (June, 1977), 5061, is Chapter X.
Page 1
Chapter 1
Introduction
The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition of
the verb conduct: "To guide or direct in a certain course of action; to
bring to a place, a particular condition or situation, a conclusion, etc.;
to lead, bring."
1 Education involves courses of action, in which teachers aim to act
together with their students to bring about certain conditions. Teachers
attempt to bring students to places where they have not been. Teachers
sometimes say that they are "bringing" their students "along." Even
without the Oxford English Dictionary, it is obvious that to conduct
ourselves or others is to act. Now look at the first definition of action
in the Oxford English Dictionary: "The process or condition of acting
or doing (in the widest sense), the exertion of energy or influence;
working, agency, operation."2 To take conducting as a course of
action, and to take acting as a synonym of doing, lead us to this
definition of the verb do: ''To produce, make, bring into existence by
one's action."3 This meaning of doing suggests a feature in action that
takes us beyond certain places, conditions, or situations. It suggests
making something, bringing something into existence by one's
actions. In one sense, of course, if teachers succeed in bringing
students along to points where they had not been, something has been
brought into existence: e.g., a person now knows what a proof in
geometry is, another has developed a sense of history, another can
balance
Page 2
equations. In another sense, students learn to bring paintings,
sculptures, poetry into existence. In yet another sense, students
working together bring into existence a shared responsibility for their
actions. Each sense is an example of conduct; conduct is action; and
to act is to do. Each example of conduct is a way of educating.
The idea that ways of thinking about education are ways of thinking
about conduct is the point of departure for the present essay. As we
have seen in the examples of terms defined in the Oxford English
Dictionary, the idea points to something so familiar in our experience
that it seems almost unnecessary to discuss it. It is clear that it would
be difficult to find anything about either education or conduct that
would enable us to deny the truth of the idea that educational theory is
a theory of conduct. Even so, being familiar with an idea is one thing;
knowing it is another. As Hegel wrote, "What is familiar is not known
simply because it is familiar."
4 For this reason we need to discuss the idea.
In the history of ideas that have shaped educational theory, two
traditions have endured from classical antiquity to the present time. In
one tradition, we find the tendency to write of education and conduct
in ways such that theories of education are theories about conduct.
Thinkers who stand in this tradition hold that principles of conduct
exist in the nature of things, and the aim of educational theory is to
know the principles. Once they are known, however, principles stand
apart from human conduct and are held to determine conduct.
Principles are taken to be the standards for which human beings exist,
and take on an existence of their own apart from conduct. There is no
single source of principles in this tradition. Three sources, however,
stand out. (1) One source is reason. Geometry, with its axioms and
postulates as unprovable premises of proof, has served as a standard
against which all thinking may be judged. If only the human mind
could come to understand a rational system of conduct with axioms
and postulates of its own, then human conduct might be shaped as are
theorems in geometry. The idea has taken various forms in the
thinking of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and others. (2) There are
otherworldly sources of principles of conduct, where the source is
literally beyond and superior to human experience, and thus capable
of evaluating it. For example, believers in otherworldly standards set
forth in the word of God hold that they have no need of human
conduct. Again the standards for human conduct stand apart from that
conduct. (3) Another source is science, not primarily rational as
geometry is, but an inductive one whose principles are derived from
experience. Some advocates of this conception of science treat its
principles as if they are about conduct rather than of conduct. For
example, certain attempts to develop a science of human development
first hold that development takes place by stages, then treat the stages
as if they
