Abstract

The listing of the aims of education is an activity with a long and partly honorable history, ranging at least from Plato’s Republic right down to what must be a sizable number of faculty curriculum committees now meeting and discovering anew that they must first of all address themselves to desired goals in order to justify their requirements and electives. Sometimes the goals have been found to be numerous and specific, sometimes few and broad: The Educational Policies Commission in The Purposes of Education in American Democracy, published in 1938, discovered some forty-three such purposes, whereas the same Commission in 1961 uncovered The Central Purpose of American Education. To be sure, R. S. Peters has asked “Must an Educator Have an Aim?” and has seemed to answer that he need not; but what he means is that listing aims is a pretty empty rhetorical exercise unless something is said about procedures, and that indeed more can be learned about real aims from examining actual or proposed procedures than from the abstract formulation of aims themselves, an idea which very much warrants a fresh statement, for all of the lifetime of effort that John Dewey devoted to its espousal.