This was scanned from the 1909 edition and mechanically checked against a commercial copy of the text from CDROM. Differences were corrected against the paper edition. The text itself is thus a highly accurate rendition. The footnotes were entered manually.

"This book has a wide scope: culture is regarded as embodying the whole range of human values, and the discussion of economic and political conditions revolves upon their effect upon the individual freedom in its relation to the development of culture. The main emphasis falls upon freedom in science and the arts, especially literature and freedom. The cry of the human soul throughout the ages has been for liberty. Our culture must be permeated with that desire for freedom"--Taken from dust (...) jacket section pasted on half-page. (shrink)

This paper is a comprehensive investigation of Freud’s views on technology and human well-being, with a focus on ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. In spite of his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, I shall argue that Freud, always in some measure under the influence of Comtean progressivism, was consistently a meliorist: He was always at least guardedly optimistic about the realizable prospect of utopia, under the ‘soft dictatorship’ of reason and guided by advances in science and technology, in spite of (...) due recognition in his later years of the possibility of annihilation through technological advances in warfare. The possibility of human annihilation, then, muffled Freud’s meliorism. Freud’s ‘muffled meliorism’, however, was not a quiet commitment to viewing technology as something good. Ultimately, Freud steered a middle course between techno-advocacy and techno-antagonism. The technologies of science, like the discoveries of psychoanalysis, were tools for humans that could be used for human betterment or, as war showed, for human degeneration. (shrink)

First published in 1899, The School and Society describes John Dewey’s experiences with his own famous Laboratory School, started in 1896. Dewey’s experiments at the Labora­tory School reflected his original social and educational philosophy based on American experience and concepts of democracy, not on European education models then in vogue. This forerunner of the major works shows Dewey’s per­vasive concern with the need for a rich, dynamic, and viable society. In his introduction to this volume, Joe R. Burnett states Dewey’s (...) theme. Industrialization, urbanization, science, and technology have created a revolution the schools cannot ignore. Dewey carries this theme through eight chapters: The School and Social Progress; The School and the Life of the Child; Waste in Education; Three Years of the University Elementary School; The Psychology of Elementary Education; Froebel’s Educa­tional Principles; The Psychology of Occupations; and the Development of Attention. (shrink)

These two short, influential books, which grew out of Dewey’s hands-on experience in administering the laboratory school at the University of Chicago, represent the earliest authoritative statement of his revolutionary emphasis on education as an experimental, child-centered process. In The School and Society, he declares that we must “make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated with the spirit of art, history, and science.” (...) In The Child and the Curriculum he stresses the importance of the curriculum as a means of determining the environment of the child, and allowing the teacher to guide children in asserting themselves, exercising their capacities, and fulfilling their own nature. 8 black-and-white illustrations. (shrink)