John Dewey

Richard Pring, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441124593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy refers to Dewey as 'generally admitted to be the leading living philosopher of America'. This honourable mention lay partly in his pragmatic theory of meaning, through which so many baffling philosophical problems were claimed to have been solved – as well as educational ones. It is in connection with his educational ideas, however, that Dewey became either famous or infamous. In the United States he had been seen both as saviour of American education by those who welcomed a more child-centred curriculum, and yet as 'worse than Hitler' by those who saw his ideas as undermining traditional education – an accusation shared by his detractors in Britain. This account seeks to bring together Dewey's educational thinking and its frequently forgotten foundations in a pragmatic theory of meaning. In so doing, the book seeks to show that John Dewey is 'a philosopher of education for our time'.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

Chapter 1

Dewey: The Man, his Life, his Writings and his Bequest

Chicago and Columbia University, New York

In 122nd Street, Manhattan, stands the prestigious Columbia University, New York. For 26 years, John Dewey was professor of philosophy there. But for him the distinction between philosophizing and thinking about education was very blurred. His philosophical analysis of ‘experience’ was central to his educational thinking, and his central educational aim of ‘growth’ was intimately tied to a pragmatic theory of meaning and value. Hence, the large hall in which he lectured was as full with educational students as it was with budding philosophers. And it was, and is, a large hall. Therefore, even if not many read his many educational works, many generations of teachers were influenced by his educational thinking. Indeed, his influence did not stop when he retired. He continued to write, tour and lecture almost till his death in 1952. It was during this period at Columbia that he wrote Democracy and Education (1916), which set out his educational philosophy most completely.

Prior to that period, Dewey had been for ten years head of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. He had been appointed in 1894, at the age of 35. Such was the significance of his philosophical thinking that the philosopher William James was inspired to say:

Chicago has a School of Thought! – a school of thought, which it is safe to predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for twenty-five years to come. Some universities have plenty of thought to show, but no school; others have plenty of school, but no thought. The University of Chicago, by its Decennial Publications, shows real thought and a real school. Professor John Dewey, and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many cooperating minds, of a view of the world, both theoretical and practical, which is so simple, massive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy.

(James, 1904, p. 172)

The publications referred to included a paper by Dewey on logical theory and one by George Herbert Mead on ‘the definition of the psychical’.

However, these ten years, before he moved in 1904 to Columbia University, New York, saw the parallel development of Dewey as philosopher and educator. The two, as I have said, were so closely integrated that it is difficult to separate them. His educational books written while he was at Chicago – School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum – embodied the principles that were made explicit in the philosophical guide to teachers, How We Think (published in 1910, after he left Chicago, but written mainly while he was there). Again one sees here the close connection between doing philosophy and thinking about education. In a way, these are not two separate activities. In thinking about the purpose of what you are doing educationally, you are necessarily thinking about the purposes of education, about the values that inform practice, and about the nature of the knowledge and experience transmitted, and these are essentially philosophical activities. Moreover, such thinking cannot be aloof from practice; it is a making sense of practice with a view to improving upon it. And so that thinking had to be embedded in the practice of teaching. At Chicago, therefore, Dewey established, with his wife, a university elementary school, of which he was the director. This was integral to the university and to its activities in the preparation of teachers.

Intellectual influences

Before we examine the beliefs that shaped Dewey’s educational thinking in Chicago and, consistently, for the rest of his long life, it is important to speak briefly of his life before his appointment in Chicago and of the key philosophical influences upon his own development.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859. At the age of 16 he went to the University of Vermont, where he read Darwin’s The Origin of Species (published in 1859) and engaged with the arguments which arose from that publication. Evolutionary theory remained a powerful influence on Dewey’s philosophical, and therefore educational, thinking. Philosophically, it helped solve the dualism of mind and body, which, in different ways, was the basis of the errors he attributed to both rationalist and empiricist traditions. Human beings are but a higher form of biological organism, with innate purposes and, therefore, with purposive adaptation to the environment, which, however, included the social environment of human interaction and culture.

Having graduated from Vermont in 1879, Dewey taught for three years in a couple of schools, not very successfully, before entering Johns Hopkins University for graduate studies in philosophy. One colleague was Charles Sanders Peirce, who is generally recognized to be the ‘founding father’ of ‘pragmatism’, although he renamed it ‘pragmaticism’ – a term so ugly that the likes of Dewey and William James were unlikely to steal it. At Johns Hopkins University, Dewey also encountered the influence of Hegelian idealism, partly through his senior colleague George Morris and partly through his subsequent acquaintance with the Oxford idealists F.H Bradley and T.H. Green. Hegel’s philosophy ‘supplied a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy’ (quoted in Westbrook, 1991, p. 14).

To put very briefly and inadequately the significance of this upon Dewey’s formation, one might say that Dewey’s ‘demand for unification’ resulted in his belief, first, in the essential connectedness of all experience; second, in the constructive role of the mind in discovering that interconnectedness; and third, in the consequent dissolving of the dualism between the ‘spectating mind’ and the ‘spectated world’. Life was to be regarded as an ‘organism’, but, as far as human beings are concerned, not in the purely biological sense; the ideas and purposes that are somehow immanent in the human organism come to fruition or realize themselves through experience.

In 1884, Dewey followed Morris to the University of Michigan, where eventually, in 1889, he became head of the philosophy department. There his idealist sympathies developed into social thinking, much influenced by his reading of T.H. Green (see, for example, Dewey’s account of this in ‘The philosophy of Thomas Hill Green’ in the Andover Review in 1889). Two features of this social thinking that are particularly relevant to his later educational ideas were, first, the central role of philosophy in helping to understand and to tackle the problems of public and social life, and, second, the ethical value of the freedom of persons to make the best of themselves. That ‘making the best of themselves’ took place within a social context – a community in which the best interests of each would be the best interests of all.

Prior, then, to his appointment at Chicago, we can see the main elements emerging which led William James to say that ‘Chicago had a School of Thought’: the idea of each ‘human organism’ growing through adaptation to the social environment; that adaptation being purposive as each person seeks meaning in his or her experience; that adaptation taking place through interaction with other persons who in turn are trying to make sense of their experience; the context of that interaction being the community of individuals that is created by those interactions and in turn affects them; the ultimate aim (the end in the ethical sense) of this purposive adaptation being the growing capacity to adapt to and to benefit from these interactive experiences; and, finally, the social agenda being that of engaging with the problems of community life. Education, then, becomes the facilitation of this growth and adaptation.

Five core beliefs

At the core of educational philosophy that inspired the establishment of the University Elementary School were five beliefs which shaped his thinking for over 50 years and which received little modification. These beliefs, set out in 1897 in ‘My pedagogic creed’, written shortly after his appointment at Chicago, were a considered reaction to what Dewey saw to be the traditional way in which education, so called, was conducted. Such traditional education was seen

•to be disconnected from the experiences that the students brought from their homes and their community

•to be disconnected from the practical and manual activity through which they are engaged with experience

•to ignore the interests that motivated young people to learn

•to treat knowledge as something purely symbolic and formal – organized in textbooks, ‘stuck on’ without connections to experience or existing ways of understanding

•to maintain discipline through external authority rather than through the engagement of the young people.

The solutions offered in the Laboratory School (see below) were a reaction to such a traditional conception of education.

First, the school should be an extension of the home and the community, bringing greater system to the acquisition of that understanding which is essential, or at least very useful, for daily living. Much practical knowledge is, of course, picked up informally in family and community, but the school’s aim should be to deepen that understanding, to enable the young people to reflect upon it, and to enhance its value – to return to home and community with something to offer and to enhance the understanding of both.

Second, in being an extension of the experience of the home and the community, the school should value manual and practical activity, which, after all, is an essential and meaningful part of that domestic and communal life. It is through such practical and manual activities as carpentry (we are now thinking about Chicago in the early twentieth century), sewing, cooking and weaving that one understands the basis of ordinary survival and living – something too often forgotten by those who theorize about the human condition.

Third, the interests of young people were to be treated as of importance in their own right, not simply as something that can be harnessed to the aims of the teacher for the purpose of motivating them to do things that they are not really interested in. The interests themselves need to be educated – the driving force to further learning.

Fourth, although school subjects at their best represent the organization of knowledge that we have inherited, they are but useful organizations, produced to help us act intelligently in the world. Their value lies in their usefulness – as resources upon which one might draw to tackle questions that rarely fit neatly into the logical boundaries set by the different subjects.

Fifth, a young person whose interests are taken seriously and whose teacher seeks to develop those interests (that is, to enable the young person to engage with them more intelligently and reflectively) will be disciplined by the pursuit of those interests – making the regime of externally imposed discipline irrelevant.

Therefore, the school is to be seen not simply as an extension of the wider community but as a community in itself, and the student is seen as an active member of that community. The behavioral discipline arises not from externally imposed sanctions but from the internalized norms of living within such a community.

Thus, behind Dewey’s experimental school was a particular view of the normal young learner: someone who is curious and interested, but whose curiosity and interests had been sapped by modes of learning which took no account of that interest in learning. Rather, the schools should reflect upon the process of inquiry and ensure that the expertise of the teacher and the cultural resources available through teachers were made available to young people as they were encouraged to pursue those interests. However, such interests, within the right kind of school community, would embrace, too, the wider needs of the community to which the individuals belonged.

Dewey’s approach to pedagogy was essentially experimental, as one might have expected, given that ‘experimentalism’ was one name given subsequently to his own distinctive philosophical position. Ideas had to be tried out and tested in practice. Therefore, the establishment of a school for testing out ideas – what came to be called the ‘Laboratory School’ – seemed to be essential. All this was before teacher training was introduced to the University of Chicago with the transfer to the university of the Chicago Institute of Education in 1901, which already had a ‘training school’ attached to it. Inevitably there was some confusion between the place of the two schools within the overall faculty and program. The Laboratory School did not survive Dewey’s departure to Columbia University in 1904 – but the ideas did.

Those ideas – to be developed further in subsequent chapters of this book – might be contrasted with the practice that was generally current, namely elementary education as very largely the transmission of information. Dewey saw it, rather, as an active engagement with a problem, with identifying a way forward, with the testing out of that ‘hypothesis’, with the community as a resource for thinking through the problem. Those problems were partly social, namely how to live in harmony with different people pursuing different, although often interacting, interests. Part of being educated la...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction: Genesis and Nature of the Book
• Part 1 Intellectual Biography
• Part 2 Critical Exposition of Dewey’s Work
• Part 3 Philosophical Underpinnings
• Part 4 A Philosopher of Education for our Time?
• References
• Index
• Copyright