How did Helvetius apply empiricism and sensationalism to education?
Claude-Adrein Helvetius was a French philosopher and worked on philosophy for the understanding of the moral world. He explained in his work that mind works with experiences only.
James Mill used Helvetius’s philosophy as a guide in educating his son, John Stuarts Mill. According to Helvetius, controlling the experiences can control the contents of mind.
Helvetius differentiated animals and human only in terms of external organization like education. According to him, education is the control of experiences and only though it, human can learn social skills, moral behavior and even can become genius.
Russell, who calls Helvetius as an optimist, rejects his view that only perfect education can make a man perfect. As Helvetius believed on hedonism, he viewed education as manipulation of pleasure and painful experiences.
According to him, humans are motivated by pleasure and they avoid pain. He considered pleasure and pain as the only principles of action in mind. Helvetius mentioned that education can only reform and improve our society and called education as a method of reform.
He elaborated in his works about the implications of empiricism and sensationalism for education. He concluded that only through control of experiences, the person’s intellectual development can be determined.