ABSTRACT
The traditional empiricist view of perception is that in perception the people receive information through the senses of the so-called external world. Certain psychologists too have reacted against the purely passive view of perception. There is, for example, a considerable emphasis on activity in the writings of Piaget, although largely in the context of a view of what the intellect has to do in order to counteract the purely passive and often distorting functioning of sensory systems. There are, however, sound objections to the notion of the given itself and to the empiricist theory of knowledge that goes with it. The perception of the color of things, for example, need not depend in any direct way on agency on a part. It neither follows nor does not follow from what the author have said that educationalists should put a premium on activity on the part of those being educated.
