Mead holds that a method of thought cannot be transferred but must be gained through the learner's own abstractions¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r3 · q1
Currency · newest study 1997 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 3 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q1 i? In the reconstructed course, Mead defines the problem of education as introducing a method of thought — problem, hypothesis, and testing — while insisting the method cannot simply be transferred and that abstractions must be made by the child himself. → Biesta 1997

Evidence¶

Biesta 1997¶

Biesta, Gert J. J. (1997). George Herbert Mead's Lectures on Philosophy of Education at the University of Chicago (1910-1911). Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED422199

q1 · i? · theoretical · r3

Reconstruction from lecture XXXIII of Mead's Course 50, in the article's section on the social origin of thought. The article reports Mead's three-stage account of thinking (problem, hypothesis, testing) and his insistence that "For a child to make use of abstraction they must have been made by himself", with training arising out of problems within the child. This is a philosophical position from the lectures, not an empirical finding.

"For a child to make use of abstraction they must have been made by himself."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

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• Mead observed that rapid change makes yesterday's knowledge useless, requiring education to teach coping with change rather than fixed content — related
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