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Education has a Social Action Purpose

According to John Dewey (1938), the entire purpose of education is “to nurture individuals to discover their full power and potential”. He later added that “…it’s not enough for a man to be good, he must be good for something.” And the thing he must be good for is to contribute to the community, to the social order, and to the lives of others in some meaningful way. Eleanor Roosevelt (1930) had earlier argued that the full power and potential of individuals is best demonstrated in good citizenship

Universities and schools can fulfill the desire to have morally responsible, civically engaged graduates. Undergraduate education should integrate cognitive skills and disciplinary knowledge with moral and civic learning, helping students develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to become active and responsible citizens of a multiracial and multicultural society. Knowledge and skills are, however, only useful when used and applied in action for the community.

For Dewey, education should be conducted in a way that is socially responsible to the present and the future. In order to achieve this, schools must move beyond the formal and rigid modes of traditional education. However, schools should not be simply reactionary and relinquish reasonable management control over education. Rather, teachers and professors should understand and apply the theory of experience from the principles of continuity and interaction to guide curriculum development to obtain a progressively developmental series of experiences.

Teaching, as the noblest activity of the university, is also the process tool to engage students intellectually in the broadest possible manner. The university is the place for meditation, contemplation, and wisdom, and not just for the busy activity of knowledge acquisition. The structure of the curriculum, including case studies pedagogies and Socratic-type tutorials, must be oriented toward the learning goal of engaging professors and students in those forms of analytic reasoning and inference that a heightened sense of curiosity…

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