After
several decades during which philosophers and others treated John Dewey's
contribution to philosophy as old fashioned or even wrong-headed, his ideas
are now once again enjoying renewed interest.
The past dozen years has seen
the issue of major publications in English on various aspects of Dewey's life
and work. These include the major secondary works in English are Robert
Westbrook's John Dewey and American Democracy, Steven Rockefeller's
John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Liberalism, Alan Ryan's John
Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, Thomas Dalton’s
Becoming John Dewey and Jay Martin’s The Education of John Dewey.
In
addition, translations and interpretations of his work have also been
published in a number of other languages. The Center has received volumes in
Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Norwegian, Finnish, Arabic, Bulgarian,
Hebrew, Portuguese, Polish, and Icelandic, and Russian. The Center is now
working with a team of professors at Fudan University in Shanghai who are
preparing a translation of the entire 37 volumes of Dewey’s Collected Works
in Chinese. I should also mention that in the years since 2000, new Centers
for the study of Dewey’s work have been inaugurated. They are at the
University of Calabria in Cosenza, Fudan University in Shanghai, the
University of Cologne, in Germany, Soka University in Tokyo, and the
University of Szeged in Hungary. The latest addition to this list, as we
know, is the Dewey Center here in Krakow at the Jagiellonian
University.
Speaking
of primary sources and bibliographies, you might like to know that during the
past dozen years, the Center for Dewey Studies has published several titles
designed to extend and support Dewey scholarship. These include an electronic
edition of the thirty-seven volume Collected Works of John Dewey; an
electronic edition of The Correspondence of John Dewey (which
includes some 20,000 items of his correspondence from 1871 to 1952); and
Works about Dewey, a major bibliography of Dewey-related materials which
is periodically supplemented on our Web site. Each of these volumes is fully
searchable by means of Boolean and hypertext methods.
In the
time allotted to me today I want to talk briefly about three related topics.
The first involves some of the reasons for the revival of interest in
Dewey's work. The second explores some of the core areas of his
thought, including his largely neglected critique of technology, that are
exciting this new enthusiasm. And the third, if time permits, takes up
the relevance of Dewey to the tasks of educators during the 21st
century. The overarching theme in my discussion will be Dewey’s social
vision, which is to say, his concept of democracy.
One of the
reasons for the revival of Deweyan pragmatism is that it now seems fairly clear
that the positivistic philosophies of the early and middle portions of the 20th
century have failed to engage life as it exists outside narrow academic
circles. Much of current Anglo-American analytic philosophy, in its attempt to
preserve aspects of the earlier positivism and most specifically its attempt to
present philosophy to university administrators as a rigorous science, continues
to demonstrate very little interest in the types of issues that are of concern
to ordinary men and women. Unlike American pragmatism and much of so-called
"continental" philosophy, it does not even attempt to be a Lebensphilosophie.
This is a
point that Richard Rorty made during his presidential address to the Eastern
Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1979. His lecture, which
later appeared in print under the title Pragmatism, Relativism, and
Irrationalism in his 1982 publication The Consequences of Pragmatism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), concluded with the
thinly-veiled charge against analytic philosophy that it had become irrelevant
to the lives of most men and women. William James and John Dewey, on the other
hand, he said, "offered what very few philosophers have succeeded in giving us:
a hint of how our lives might be changed." (p. 175)
What are
the philosophical issues that Dewey and the other pragmatists thought important,
and whose identification and clarification can change lives? They can of
course be characterized broadly in traditional philosophical terms as problems
of knowledge and valuation. More specifically, however, they include issues
such as the methods of inculcating basic skills without dampening the learner’s
native curiosity, the place of ethics in the schools and the workplace, the
means and methods of constructing and maintaining the life of communities of
interest, and the means of assessing the human impact of developing tools and
techniques. They are reflected in the titles of some of Dewey's most
influential books: The Child and the Curriculum, The School and
Society, Democracy and Education, How We Think, Experience
and Nature, Art as Experience, and of course Ethics. For
Dewey and the other pragmatists, these issues lie at the core of the
philosophical enterprise.
One of the
works we recently edited at the Center is a two volume anthology of his
published works entitled The Essential Dewey. That title is ironic, and
intentionally so, for Dewey was an ardent opponent of the type of
super-naturalist and extra-naturalist essences such as those postulated by Plato
and favored by his heirs of the medieval, modern, and even contemporary periods
of thought.
But the
title is nevertheless descriptive. First, Dewey did not abandon essences all
together – far from it. He merely functionalized and operationalized them. By
this I mean that along with his friend William James, he argued that essences
are selected or constructed by the human organism in the process of adapting to
its environment. They are neither just discovered as fixed and finished,
perhaps delivered to us from a platonic heaven, nor are they the result of
random associations of sense data or ideas, perhaps invented as a part of
post-modernist literary criticism.
As Dewey
demonstrated in his classic 1896 essay, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,"
essences are selected, or perhaps better put, they are constructed on the basis
of the interests and aptitudes of the organism as it interacts with experienced
environing conditions. Thus, even though those functionalized essences become
real as they are used to settle some difficulty, it would be fallacious either
to say that they exist prior to cognition or to take them as the last word on
the ultimate structure of this or any other world.
Essences
are, as William James wrote, teleological weapons of the mind. Or, to employ a
somewhat less aggressive metaphor, we might say that they are the tools that
human organisms utilize as they go about the business of adjusting to the
changing conditions of their physical and social environments.
This novel
treatment of essences was an important plank in the instrumentalist platform
that Dewey and his students, including the psychologist and sociologist George
Herbert Mead, developed and articulated at the University of Chicago during
Dewey's decade there, from 1894 to 1904. Dewey's instrumentalism was, moreover,
the first attempt by a professional philosopher to develop a comprehensive
critique of technology.
His
critique was comprehensive because it included accounts of education, the arts,
a theory of inquiry, social and political philosophy, a philosophy of religion,
and social psychology. To my knowledge, no other writer before or since has
cast his net as broadly as did Dewey in terms of his analysis and critique of
contemporary technology and his proposals for the ways in which technology can
contribute to social reform.
His account
anticipates by several decades the work of Martin Heidegger, whose important
book Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, is still widely regarded as the
first serious attempt to construct a philosophical account of technology. But
whereas Heidegger was at that time – prior to the period of his Rectorship and
his disastrous affiliation with the National Socialists – primarily interested
in a phenomenological analysis of tools and artifacts, Dewey related technology
to the role of education in democratic societies. And this was just one of his
many interests.
The key to
understanding Dewey's work as a contribution to the philosophy of technology –
and therefore his social vision – is an appreciation of his contention that all
inquiry, or deliberation, or problem solving, is a reconstruction of problematic
situations that involves tools and artifacts. And whether those tools and
artifacts are abstract or concrete, tangible or intangible, inquiry is therefore
instrumental. In other words, inquiry is the study of our habits and techniques
insofar as they have broken down or become problematic. Technology, as its name
implies, is therefore the logos or study of our habits and techniques –
and this in the same sense that biology is the study of, or inquiry into life
forms. Techn-ology is thus for Dewey linked to his famous method of inquiry as
it was articulated in his little book How We Think and elsewhere.
Dewey’s
anti-essentialism, and his theory of inquiry, including his critique of
technology, thus play an central role in his social vision. They allow him to
avoid two extremes that have vitiated much social theory and practice. The
first is an essentialism that attempts to impose fixed and finished norms and
ideals on human experience. This is the view that ends should dominate means. The second is the type of relativism popular in some post-modernist quarters, a
relativism that replaces referentiality with reflexivity, texts with textuality,
and that honors means – which in many cases means style – over ends.
So Dewey’s
root metaphor was technological. He argued that technology involves more than
just tangible tools, machines, and factories. It also involves the abstract
thought and cultural practices that provide the contexts for such things and
make them possible. His view of this matter was based upon his broad
characterization of technology, that I have formulated as the invention,
development, and cognitive deployment of tools and other artifacts, brought to
bear on raw materials and intermediate stock parts, with a view to the
resolution of perceived problems.
This is my
gloss on thousands of words that Dewey devoted to the subject of technology. It
is also quite close to his own statement that "'Technology' signifies all the
intelligent techniques by which the energies of nature and man are directed and
used in satisfaction of human needs; it cannot be limited to a few outer and
comparatively mechanical forms. In the face of its possibilities, the
traditional conception of experience is obsolete." (LW.5.270)
It might be
objected that this characterization begs the question, or commits the fallacy of
circular argumentation, by identifying technology with "intelligent
techniques." But what Dewey in fact accomplished by putting matters as he did
was the very distinction between technology, on the one side, and tools and
techniques, on the other, that is reflected in the etymology of the words. Techniques are what we have with us daily, and we most often employ them
transparently, without thinking. Technology, on the other hand, is the "ology"
or "logos" of techniques. It is the study of techniques as surely as biology is
the study of "bios," or living things. So Dewey's definition does not beg the
question so much as it honors word origins and makes a distinction that is
worthy of being both understood and maintained.
Dewey's
view of these matters constitutes a radical departure from the epistemology of
the modern period of philosophy. At least since Descartes it had been generally
accepted that the central problem of epistemology was the problem of skepticism:
how is experience possible and how is it that we can have certain or reliable
knowledge of the world? Although the story of modern epistemology is long and
complex, certain of its features stand out in high profile. As Descartes and
other modern philosophers attempted to move out from under the influence of
medieval scholastic thought, they faced the difficulty of constructing a
foundation for science that offered the same level of certitude that
scholasticism had claimed. Since their move was toward naturalism, however,
they were obligated to locate certitude within the realm of nature instead of
within the realm of the supernatural.
The best
recourse seemed to Descartes and others to treat certainty as knowledge
possessed by an individual thinking mind. Modern theories of knowledge
and belief were thus designed to find ways of depicting states of affairs in a
world that was assumed to exist separately from a thinking mind, and this in a
way that would insure that such depictions were reliable. Unfortunately, these
Cartesian ways of thinking have persisted even into the 20th and 21st
centuries. The varieties of behaviorism advanced by John B. Watson and B. F.
Skinner were among what I would describe as futile attempts to deal with
Cartesian dualism, and the assaults on skepticism mounted by much current
Anglo-American epistemology represent equally futile attempts to come to terms
with his skepticism. Believe it or not, some philosophers are still chewing
the cud of attempts to refute skeptics. The failure of these programs is the
result, in my view, of their failure to progress beyond the Cartesian model, to
come to terms with a truly social psychology and a theory of knowing that
assumes human experience rather than attempting to discover the
foundations for it.
Unlike
Descartes, Dewey thought the search for foundations futile. He preferred to
talk about platforms. In his view, we enter a world filled with various
platforms, many of which afford us the opportunities to construct even better
platforms. Sometimes, however, even big and important platforms can tip over
and even disappear. This is an idea that Thomas Kuhn was later develop in his
now famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Like the
late-nineteenth-century photographers who attempted to get ever better emulsions
for ever more accurate photographs of a world outside and independent of their
cameras, these Cartesian epistemologists were, and still are, attempting to get
ever more accurate mental representations of a world that they thought, and
still think, is outside and independent of the human mind. They have
characterized that world not just as independent of mind, but also as what it is
without respect to whether or not it is ever know by one of those independent
minds. Their quest is the quest for certainty, with a full complement of fixed
and finished essences.
Dewey’s
experiments in psychology (and for Dewey, psychology is social
psychology) led him to the view that this "picture theory" or "spectator theory"
of knowledge was deeply flawed. He reasoned that knowing is not just the
capturing of a picture or impression, but an active and experimental involvement
of an entire organism (not just a "thinking substance" or even a brain) with the
raw materials of its experience in such a manner that tools – including habits
and potential habits, such as hypotheses, for example – are brought to bear on
those materials and new products are thus formed. And he thought that the point
of making these new products was not to take a more accurate pictorial
representation of what was or had been the case (for example, an external "state
of affairs"), but rather to deal with felt problems and difficulties in ways
that effected their objective resolution. He thought that inquiry is always
launched for the sake of resolving some specific felt difficulty. When inquiry
is successful, he argued, it produces a new product – a new outcome.
For Dewey,
then, there is no such thing as knowledge in general. Rather, the production of
new knowledge in specific cases, ranging from the most quotidian and concrete to
the most abstract, involves technology just as surely as does cases of
problem-solving in chemical engineering. This is because we live forward in
time in a world that is perilous at best and in continual need of being "tuned
up." We have to keep turning out new knowledge-products, including new tools
and methods, if we are to convert conditions that are precarious into situations
that are stable, harmonious, and more nearly what we wish them to be. This is
the process that Dewey termed "technology."
For Dewey,
therefore, one of the most important concerns of philosophy was not so much
epistemology, or the attempt to deal with the problem of skepticism, but logic,
or the theory of inquiry. Inquiry, he once wrote, is not so much a matter of
"grasping antecedently given sureties" as it is a matter of experimentation, or
"making sure." (LW.1.123) This remark goes to the heart of Dewey’s social
vision.
Unlike
modernist epistemology, Dewey's notion of inquiry emphasizes the use of raw
materials and the tools that have been designed for the refinement of those
materials. It also involves other tools whose purpose it is to refine and
reconstruct tools that already exist, but that are simpler and more primitive. Inquiry also requires the production and stockpiling of intermediate parts,
among which are relatively secure concepts and objects. The end or goal of
inquiry is products that can be said to be finished in a relative sense of that
term, that is, satisfactory until they are challenged by further experience and
demonstrated to be in need of being reworked or reconstructed.
Dewey
worked out this extended technological metaphor for inquiry at great length in
the introduction to his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic. That essay is
pervaded by technical figures of speech. Here is a typical example:
Hence, while all meanings are
derived from things which antedate suggestion or thinking or "consciousness" –
not all qualities are equally fitted to be meanings of a wide efficiency, and it
is a work of art to select the proper qualities for doing the work. This
corresponds to the working over of raw material into an effective tool. A spade
or a watch-spring is made out of antecedent material, but does not pre-exist as
a ready-made tool; and, the more delicate and complicated the work which it has
to do, the more art intervenes. (MW.10.354)
Dewey
wanted to demystify those entities traditionally called "logical objects,"
"essences," and "ideals," by taking them out of the psychical or metaphysical
realms they had occupied in the works of Plato and Frege, for example, and by
treating them as so many tools in a toolbox. These tools include logical
connectives and numbers, abstract terms such as "democracy," and essences such
as "disease" or "the family." When it is understood that these entities are
tools and the products of tools, then it will also be understood that they are
open to reconstruction and reconfiguration. They will not be honored as
essences that are deemed to be fixed and finished for all time. The conceptual
tools called upon by governments, church hierarchies, and yes, even university
professors, are thus for Dewey continually open to the need for reconstruction
and reconfiguration.
So Dewey
argued that essences and ideals should be treated not as absolute and fixed, but
instead as just more artifacts, constructed not so much by inquiry as
arising from inquiry. They are not found within a chain of inference,
but are instead the byproducts of inference. In this way they are like
agricultural implements that are developed and improved not as a direct
consequence of farming but incidentally, as the byproducts of tilling, planting,
and harvesting.
As Dewey
argued in his 1938 Logic, the subject matter and the specific tactical
methods of inquiry may be, and most likely are, different from one of these
enterprises to the next; but each enterprise nevertheless participates within a
more general strategic form of inquiry that he called the "general method
of intelligence." Because his root metaphor was technological, however, Dewey
was able to do explicitly what Peirce and James had done only implicitly. He
was able, for example, to reconstruct the important categories of human activity
traditionally termed "theory," "practice," and "production."
He did this
by reconstructing the Aristotelian hierarchy of types of knowledge. Aristotle
had lived in a world in which science was still only empirical and not yet
experimental. In other words, Aristotle's science was observational, and not
yet instrumental. Instrumentation was not yet viewed as an essential
ingredient in science, nor as a source of insights into the pattern of
successful inquiry. Aristotle therefore held theory, or contemplation, to be
the highest form of knowledge and as such he regarded it as superior to
practice, which he in turn regarded superior to production.
But because
Dewey's emphasis was on the production of successful outcomes as the end of
inquiry, he treated theory and practice as component parts within inquiry and as
instruments for further production. He did not completely invert the
Aristotelian schema, however, since he regarded theory and practice as phases of
inquiry, whose outcome is the production of something new. In Dewey's view,
theory and practice must cooperate if there is to be success in the production
of new knowledge. This is an important matter that deserves more detailed
attention.
Despite the
claims of some of its critics, pragmatism is in the last analysis not a
philosophy of action. In a richer sense than has been developed even by the
critical theorists, for example, pragmatism is a philosophy of production. To put the matter a bit differently, it is a philosophy of "warranted
assertibility" in the broadest sense in which what is assertible with warrant is
a part of art, historiography, and law, as well as the technosciences.
Productive pragmatism is not interested in action for its own sake, as Bertrand
Russell had accused it of being, but in action that operationalizes outcomes
with a view to the production of tools and habits of action. Its concern
focuses on the checks and cues that validate the results of the interactions of
thinking and other types of behavior as such interactions come to be worked out
in the realm of existential affairs.
Productive
pragmatism thus regards the question of primacy regarding theory and praxis as a
false and misleading question. Two of the three great pragmatists of the
classical period – Peirce and Dewey – exhibit remarkable unanimity on this
matter and James was moving toward their position at the end of his life: the
goal of inquiry is not action, but the construction of new and more refined
habits, tools, goals, and meanings, in short, new and more refined products. The term "more refined" is in their work operationalized,
contextualized, and provisionalized. This is more or less what we
term "growth," and it is the core of Dewey's educational theory.
Nowhere did
Dewey express the matter more clearly than in his Gifford Lectures, published in
1929 as The Quest for Certainty. "In reaction against the age-long
depreciation of practice in behalf of contemplative knowledge," he wrote, "there
is a temptation simply to turn things upside down. But the essence of pragmatic
instrumentalism [what I have called productive pragmatism] is to conceive of
both knowledge [or theory] and practice as means of making goods –
excellencies of all kinds – secure in experienced existence." (LW.4.30 n.1.)
In the
hands of the productive pragmatist, then, theory and practice become equal
partners as phases of inquiry. Working together, they orient themselves not
just to the analysis of the past or present, but to plans for the future. Like
good business partners, they are always negotiating with one another about the
feasibility, design, cost, and marketability of potential products. Theory
keeps an eye on practice, making sure that options are kept open, that
imagination enters into the design stage, and that potential products are
coherent with the larger goals of the firm. Practice keeps an eye on theory,
making sure that design and production goals are not too ambitious or too
fanciful, that products correspond to the needs of the market, that inventories
of products and spare parts are maintained, and that the cash flow is sufficient
to start the next project. Together, theory and practice engage in a
conversation that constantly adjusts means to ends-in-view, and ends-in-view to
the means at hand. The goal of the partnership is not merely action, but
production. The goal of the partnership is continual adjustment to changing
situations by means of the development of enhanced tools and new products.
But I can
imagine someone saying, "what about norms"? Doesn't this leave Dewey with an
unstable and untenable form of relativism? Whence arise the norms by means of
which we judge our tools, techniques, and other products, including those that
are social and political? Dewey addressed this question in the introduction to
his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic. Just as in the case of
agricultural practice, they are formed not by farming, but from
farming. Ceteris paribus, the norms of democratic life are formed not
by democratic processes, but arise from the democratic processes. The norms of democratic life are the byproducts of democratic life as it
is constructively pursued. Norms arise neither from the iron laws of history nor
even from the specific hardware or materials of technology. They arise through
the interaction of theory and practice as it provides intelligent answers to
perceived problems.
This
interaction between theory and practice is, in Dewey's view, the basis not only
for successful everyday life, and for the technosciences, but for social and
political life as well. More specifically, Dewey defined democracy as "belief
in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which
further experience will grow in ordered richness." (LW. 14.229) Democracy is
therefore not the maintenance of an historical institution. It is not a
particular form of government (much less the export of some specific form of
government from one location to another). It is not work toward a fixed goal or
essence. It is instead a method of experimentation, a method of production, a
method of education, or what amounts to the same thing, a method of growth of
individuals and communities. Dewey wanted to convince us that methods of
democracy, like the methods of the technosciences in their broadest sense,
involve "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." (LW.14.229)
What did
Dewey mean by experience in this connection? He told us that it is "that free
interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions, especially
the human surroundings, which develops and satisfies need and desire by
increasing knowledge of things as they are...
Need and desire – out of which grow purpose and direction of energy – go beyond
what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science [as body of knowledge].
They continually open the way into the unexplored and unattained future."
(LW.14.229)
In Dewey's
view, then, one of the many paths to democratization involves the introduction
into political and social life of the types of techniques of experimentation,
discovery, and production that have proved so successful in the various
technoscientific disciplines. These paths to democratization are committed
neither to any particular institution, to any particular historical practice,
nor to any particular set of beliefs (although they do rule out some
institutions, historical practices, and sets of beliefs as having failed
experimental tests). Neither are they committed to any predetermined goal
(unless that goal be described as the growth of individuals and communities). Because of their intimate relationship to the technosciences and education,
these pragmatic paths do not seek any particular result. They call instead for
the application of methods of adjustment that have proven successful in the
various technoscientific disciplines, and in education (insofar as they have
been tried out), but that have yet to be applied in many areas of human life. Such methods are open-ended in terms of their potential for their own
(methodological) self-development and self-correction.
For Dewey,
the type of education that is the consequence of this productive pragmatism is
neither indoctrination on the one side, nor haphazard self-expression on the
other. It involves instead the interaction –or transaction – between teacher
and learner – between expert and non-expert, if you will – in ways that alter
and enrich the experience of both. It is this feature of education – not just
in the schools but in a life-long curriculum – that makes it such a potent agent
for social reform.
In the
broad sense in which Dewey uses the terms, therefore, democracy is the name of
the method of inquiry which, when applied to political association, enriches and
makes worthwhile the life of each associated individual and therefore enriches
the associated whole. And it is only as such political associations themselves
become richer and more meaningful that other manifestations of technological
culture will achieve balance.
For Dewey,
the paths to democratization lead through the schools, through the local
newspaper and the national journal of opinion, and through various levels of
government. They lead through the workplace, through the places where religious
and civic groups gather, and through the courts. They lead to more, not less
technology, once technology is understood as the intelligent production of new
tools, including conceptual and ideational ones, for dealing with problematic
situations. They lead not to the cheap talk about individualism that is most
often a cover for retreat from common action (as in some forms of
libertarianism), but to a true commitment at every level of government to
fostering a true individuality that enables children and adults alike to
undertake a lifelong quest to develop their capacities to the fullest extent,
whatever those capacities may be.
For Dewey,
technology is a rich blend of theory and practice that eventuates in new and
improved tools for living and out of which new norms develop. It involves
improved taxonomies of perception as inquirential skills are improved. Linguistic and other types of analysis, together with practice of all sorts,
constitute phases of inquiry, but are neither separately nor conjointly
its equivalent. For Dewey, technology has to do with ideals and goals and
ends-in-view in so far as they are transformed by means of intelligence. For
Dewey, differentiation between tangible and intangible tools is a functional,
not an ontological matter. When such differentiation is required, it does not
exist in re but in inquiry.
What I find
so attractive in Dewey's work is his deep commitment to three ideas about
technology and democratization, or what in a 1939 essay he called "political
technology." The first is that democratic reform is not a matter of
distinguishing technological artifacts from the ways in which we use them,
because our technological artifacts are the ways we use them. The
second is that there are no recipes for democratic reform, nor could there
be. Reform is not a goal but a process that takes on new dimensions and new
import at each stage of its development and whose outcome can therefore never be
predicted. And third, continuing democratic reform is more or less
what Dewey meant by education. In these three ideas, I believe, we come very close
to Dewey’s social vision.
Let me now
take a moment to turn even more specifically to the problems associated with
education. Dewey's essay "The Sources of a Science of Education," published in
1929, provides major insights into the essence of his educational program.
One of his
most difficult and most misunderstood ideas may be found in that essay. It is
also one of his most crucial ideas, provided that we want to understand his
blueprint for reconstructing education. He put the matter with such subtlety,
however, that at first glance his statement appears disarmingly simple and it is
easy to miss his point.
He wrote
that "education is itself a process of discovering what values are worthwhile
and are to be pursued as objectives. To see what is going on and to observe the
results of what goes on so as to see their further consequences in the process
of growth, and so on indefinitely, is the only way in which the value of what
takes place can be judged. To look to some outside source to provide aims is to
fail to know what education is as an ongoing process." (LW.5.38)
There are
several things worth noting about this remark.
First, it
does not say, and in fact denies, that social conditions are to be the sources
of such discovery. The same is true of educators themselves. Social
conditions, far from providing the ultimate norms for valuation, are among the
things that education is called upon to evaluate. And even the ideas and ideals
of the educator himself or herself, expressed in the form of syllabi, lesson
plans, or directives, must be evaluated in terms of the broader educational
processes that Dewey here characterizes.
Second,
Dewey's remark implies that neither the methods nor the contents of the
technosciences are directly applicable to education in the absence of
concrete, experienced problems. In other words, the methods and contents of the
sciences are instrumental to education, and not its equivalent. Allegedly
scientific tests, such as those that are administered to assess personality or
intelligence, are not where education begins, even though they may be useful
educational tools when utilized on an individual basis. Nor does education
begin with instructions about how to take standardized tests (though it does
sometimes seem to end there).
Third,
Dewey's statement sets out a method of constructing norms that is not restricted
to classroom education. The method described in this passage is repeated
throughout Dewey's work. In his 1916 presentation to the Columbia Philosophy
Club, for example, published later as "Logical Objects," in the introduction to
his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic, and, in fact, in every one of his
major works, he emphasized this point. Norms that function in the service of
evaluation are generated not as a direct result of the practice of education,
but arise as byproducts of it. This is a central feature of Dewey's
instrumentalism.
In what
remains of my time I want to discuss the first of these points in more detail.
Social
conditions as such cannot be the source of educational values. This is true in
two important senses. Wherever prevailing practices determine educational
values, then education becomes little more than a matter of applying the results
of surveys and polls. (Of course surveys and polls may in fact have great value
for educators – but in a different sense than the one just described.) If
social conditions as such were the source of educational values, then the values
entrenched or enshrined in a community would need only to be sampled
scientifically and then brought into the classroom to be reported, rehearsed,
and absorbed.
Where
educational practice of this type is honored, of course, there is the continual
danger of disagreements regarding which of the community's values will be
accepted – and indeed which of the many communities that make up the wider
society shall even be permitted to assert its own values as candidates for
acceptance. This is precisely the type of education against which Dewey argued
so forcefully during his decade at the University of Chicago, from, 1894 to
1904. He continually reminded his readers that rote practice without
opportunities to innovate through creative hypothesis-formation and testing
fails to be educative: it is little more than indoctrination and initiation into
the traditions of existing norms.
If social
conditions were accepted as the source of values in a second, alternative sense
of the term, then educational values might be imported from lists and catalogues
of traditional "virtues," to mention just one course of action that happens to
have been urged upon us by William Bennett, a former U.S. Secretary of
Education who has published a "Book of Virtues." Or perhaps the "great ideas"
of the past would be taught as adequate guides for future actions. Education
would then in the main consist of reading "the great books" and applying their
lessons.
Of course
existing "social conditions" must be understood before they can be criticized,
and the great books must be read before their applicability to current issues
can be ascertained. Dewey was clear enough on this point: what he termed
education required that the student should acquire increasingly broad
perspectives with respect to received values.
Dewey's
efforts to teach geopolitics at his elementary school, for example, began with
the study of fibers and foodstuffs. The pupils grew vegetables, which they
cooked and ate. They produced cloth from cotton and wool. Then Dewey and his
students worked outward to the study of history and trade, and went from there
to take up the interaction of these factors with the geography and political
organizations of particular world regions.
During the
past few minutes I have attempted to suggest some of the reasons why Dewey's
ideas are now enjoying a renaissance, what kinds of ideas were at the heart of
his project, and what that project can offer us as citizens of the 21st
century. In doing so I have invited you to consider the implications of Dewey’
global outreach for our new century.