John Dewey: “we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time, Kant’s philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational enterprises.”
Source: John Dewey, Democracy and Education, Chapter 7, “The Democratic Conception in Education.”
Related: John Dewey | Democracy and Education | Philosophers, Explained series:
Was it lost on Dewey that whoever starts an education system would be “of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances” Or did he address that in some way?
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Creation of a general theory, use of education to experiment with this general theory. The child becomes an object of experimentation. It will be necessary to take control of education to globally apply the general theory. Education in a centralized system becomes a tool to transform the human being, a tool of social constructivism. Progressive constructivists convinced that it is for the good of humanity, will want to keep the monopoly of education, and all conservative ideas having proven over time their effectiveness concerning the education of children, will be rejected. In a statist, centralized system, gangrened by progressivism, any other way of doing education via the private sector, will be monitored, regulated.
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