To stunt a mind means to arrest its conceptual development, its - TopicsExpress

To stunt a mind means to arrest its conceptual development, its power to use abstractions—and to keep it on a concrete-bound, perceptual method of functioning. John Dewey, the father of modern education (including the Progressive nursery schools), opposed the teaching of theoretical (i.e., conceptual) knowledge, and demanded that it be replaced by concrete, “practical” action, in the form of “class projects” which would develop the students’ social spirit. “The mere absorbing of facts and truths,” he wrote, “is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” (John Dewey, The School and Society, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1956, p. 15.) This much is true: the perception of reality, the learning of facts, the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, are exclusively individual capacities; the mind is an exclusively individual “affair”; there is no such thing as a collective brain. And intellectual integrity—the refusal to sacrifice one’s mind and one’s knowledge of the truth to any social pressures—is a profoundly and properly selfish attitude. The goal of modern education is to stunt, stifle and destroy the students’ capacity to develop such an attitude, as well as its conceptual and psycho-epistemological preconditions. There are two different methods of learning: by memorizing and by understanding. The first belongs primarily to the perceptual level of a human consciousness, the second to the conceptual. -Rand