John Dewey on education, etc.

 This was posted to my Democracy and Education course blogsite, they're reading Dewey's Democracy and Education.

• Democracy is "a belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience shall grow in ordered richness." -Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us  (1939). True? Believable? Aspirational?  
• Are public schools still (were they ever, can they still be) an "assimilative force" for unity in American life, bringing people of different races, religions, and customs together?
• COMMENT: "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy." The School and Society (1899)
•  Every school, as he wrote in The School and Society, must become "an embryonic community life...we shall (then) have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious." Is this utopian? Can you foresee a time when our legislators view public education in this light, and fund it accordingly?
• Dewey's favorite words: reconstruction, renewal, growth, intelligence... What do these concepts mean to you, in the context of American democracy and its future prospects?
•  Does "experiential learning" or "learning by doing" work, in school and in life? 
• Why do you think "progressive education" is so often mocked and caricatured by critics?
• Has your own education been "interdisciplinary" at any level? (How's the MALA program doing, on that score?) Is the present structure of higher education in this country conducive to interdisciplinary understanding?
• COMMENT: "...the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education." -The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand
• “The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in education.” -Menand. What would Dewey say about that? What do you say?
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“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” John Dewey, A Common Faith (1934)

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”― John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) was the most significant educational thinker of his era and, many would argue, of the 20th century. As a philosopher, social reformer and educator, he changed fundamental approaches to teaching and learning. His ideas about education sprang from a philosophy of pragmatism and were central to the Progressive Movement in schooling. In light of his importance, it is ironic that many of his theories have been relatively poorly understood and haphazardly applied over the past hundred years.

Dewey's concept of education put a premium on meaningful activity in learning and participation in classroom democracy. Unlike earlier models of teaching, which relied on authoritarianism and rote learning, progressive education asserted that students must be invested in what they were learning. Dewey argued that curriculum should be relevant to students' lives. He saw learning by doing and development of practical life skills as crucial to children's education. Some critics assumed that, under Dewey's system, students would fail to acquire basic academic skills and knowledge. Others believed that classroom order and the teacher's authority would disappear.To Dewey, the central ethical imperative in education was democracy. Every school, as he wrote in The School and Society, must become "an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history and science. When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious."pbs

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...In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society, and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling—students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting—was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete... neh

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There are only a few ideas that had as much of an impact on education as those of John Dewey. The American philosopher, psychologist and educator believed children to be active contributors and agents of their learning, and not just passive recipients of knowledge of previous generations. He believed that for knowledge to be acquired successfully, learning should be an experience. His Experiential Learning approach was based on four core principles... (continues)

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Philip Kitcher (Columbia U.), another philosopher I rubbed shoulders with in Chicago last February, thins Dewey is the most important philospher of the 20th century. In this lecture he offers a Dewey-eyed vision for reconstruction in the profession of philosophy. "Philosophy is not only reconstructed, but also turned inside out."

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“Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs.”
― John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy

• *“The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.”
• “An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children.”
• “The most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.”
• “If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.”
• “Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.”
• “Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.”
• “Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.”
• “Now in many cases—too many cases—the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being.”

Democracy Through Education

John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had a global reach, his psychological theories had a sizable influence in that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice deeply influenced debates in academic and practical quarters for decades. In addition, Dewey developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion...

Dewey’s efforts to connect child, school, and society were motivated by more than just a desire for better pedagogical methods. Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and experiment with democracy. Democratic life consists not only in civic and economic conduct, but more crucially in habits of problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self-governance. The full range of roles a child might assume in life is vast; once this is appreciated, it is incumbent upon society to make education its highest political and economic priority. During WWII, Dewey wrote,

There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose outstanding trait is change. (“Between Two Worlds”, 1944, LW17: 463)

Democracy, on Dewey’s view, was much more comprehensive than a form of government. 

“Democracy”, Dewey wrote, “is not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the idea of community life itself” (PP, LW2: 328). Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make sense out of new experiences. 

Education "is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience." (DE, MW9: 82)

In other words, the engine of America’s political identify was creative experimentation; in order to fulfill their eventual roles as fully participating citizens, students needed education in the habits (imaginative, empirical) which made the experimental sciences so successful. Dewey called such attitudes and habits “intelligence”.[34]

Informing all the spheres just discussed—science, education, and democratic life—is Dewey’s naturalism which places hope not in what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) but in the human capacity to learn from life. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939b) Dewey wrote,

Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. (“Creative Democracy”, LW14: 229)

The success or failure of democracy rests on education. Education is most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to investigate problematic beliefs and situations, to communicate openly, throughout. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to the coming generation, it is critical, Dewey thought, to distinguish between education which inculcates collaborative and creative hypothesizing and education which foments obeisance to parochialism and dogma. And philosophy must apply this same standard to itself. SEP

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Moral insights come from the demands of others, not from any individual’s isolated reflections. And insights come from all social quarters. Intelligent revision of norms therefore requires practices of moral inquiry that stress mutual responsiveness to others’ claims, and social inclusion of all members of society. Such practices are constitutive features of democracy, understood as a form of everyday life (not simply as a type of state constitution) (CD 224–230). This is the point at which Dewey’s political philosophy emerges from his ethics. Democracy, in Dewey’s view, is the means by which we practice intelligent moral inquiry together, seeking solutions to the problems we face together... Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society... (SEP)

Other Internet Resources

• Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
• John Dewey, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• John Dewey, American Pragmatist, (pragmatism.org)
• John Dewey Society
• Links to Full-text Works by and about John Dewey, (dmoz open directory project)

Related Entries

Dewey, John | Dewey, John: aesthetics | Dewey, John: political philosophy | education, philosophy of | pragmatism

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