Dewey's View of Education

Jim Garrison on Dewey's view of education:

"Eventually in teaching as in life, it is more important to be somebody in relationship to others than to know something, however important curriculum and pedagogical knowledge may be."

The Question of Education

As I inch closer to the completion of my dissertation, I have been confronted with a question to which I was sure I had the answer. And, as is the case in most true education, the more I have read and studied the more I have moved away from my original answer.

The question is this: what is education? Because everyone has attended school, everyone thinks they know the answer to the question. With that knowledge, most consider the question once or twice, and then move on to more "important" things.

As I have read Rousseau, Dewey, Hume and Kant, I have come to the realize that the question is actually more important than the answer to the question. Each has taken education and turned it one way and addressed it another way in order to present their views on the process, but one of the things that stood out to me reading these philosophical giants is the question... it was always in the front of their thinking and never dismissed.

Dewey, in 1938, addressed educators with the idea of considering this question daily. His view is that this is a question that those of us in education must wrestle with daily in order to progress as educators. Education, the process, is much more than curriculum, pedagogy and policies. There is not a quick and sure answer to most questions, especially questions regarding education. But, if we consider the question every day, we start to slowly understand that the question keeps our thinking on the true nature of education... a process that is living, changing and so influential.

What is education? Let me think about it and get back to you.  

Some thoughts on Dewey

John Dewey attempted to do the impossible – link education to culture by way of the democratic ideal. Dewey’s view of democracy was one rooted somewhat in altruism, or at least, that was his initial goal. Dewey wrote in Experience and Education (1938) that democracy promotes a better quality human experience for the most members of society. Dewey’s early focus in education was rooted in this idea so his focus naturally was to build what he labeled as “democratic” schools. For Dewey, a school, by its very nature, must be part of the community. There were two fundamental criteria for his school: first, the school must be a community in which every aspect of the school is in essence a teachable moment. The second, the school should foster learning that is continuous and ongoing outside of school.

For Dewey, education was his main agency for cultural formation, but as Dewey grew older, he lost faith in this role for education. Dewey was a meliorist and it is this belief in an improving world aided by humans, that I believe, was a contributing factor to his increased pessimism in the cultural role of education. If, as Dewey believed, the world was improving and that improvement was aided and hastened by human beings, then, naturally, one of the best mechanisms for aiding the world was the processes of education. Dewey believed in a cumulative progress of culture, but in my opinion, Dewey got a few things wrong. First, he did not factor into his views the idea of power and its role in an evolving culture (I do not use the term "evolving" here in the evolutionary scientific sense but merely as a means of reference to the continuous movement of culture as opposed to the view that culture is stagnate.). Secondly, Dewey saw the structure of the economy as the central obstacle of a more just society (Schultz, 2001, p.280.). He did not see other areas as obstacles in the same way that he say the economic structure nor did he anticipate their influences on the educational process.

During Dewey's time the scientific method was growing in popularity and power. He embraced it and all of the new forces it produced, viewing it as the change that would allow education to take its rightful place as the cultural change agency he thought it was. This did not take place, and in my opinion, Dewey, here, underestimates severely the power of the industrialization and the hunger that profit and power would produce in people. The combination of these events would cause him to move away from his meliorist ways and embrace a view that society was more stagnate than he had anticipated. 

Dewey gradually recognized the problem of uniting his "democratic" school so closely to culture. He realized that this union would provide a pathway for power to enter education and eventually overtake it and consume it. Since he believed that schools were agents of culture he was concerned that schools would become not only agents of culture but agents of power capable of changing culture, but not in just ways as Dewey had visioned. Dewey felt that he had given society a tool for social change and now that tool had been hijacked by the powerful to be used for change that benefited the powerful and not society as a whole.

Is Dewey right? Has it come to that? Are schools now agents of culture and power capable of adding power to the most powerful? If our answer to any of these questions is yes, then, we must ask the next immediate question: where do our students fit into this process? Dewey believed in an educational process that included the student and one that educated the whole student. If the process is now mostly a process of collective cultural change, are we even educating individual students anymore? Hmmm?  

Schutz, Aaron. (2001) John Dewey’s conundrum: Can democratic schools empower. Teachers College Record, 103 (2), 267-302.

Democracy

Benjamin Levin, in his article, The Educational Requirement of Democracy, defined democracy as that which involves participative processes at the action level. His thought is that democracy is about this idea that people should be involved in making decisions that directly affect them. John Dewey, who I am studying on a regularly basis these days, had much to say about democracy and education.

Dewey attempted to link education with democracy because he believed we prefer democracy because it promotes a better quality of human experience for the maximum number of people. Dewey felt strongly that the traditional school had grown out of a nontraditional social order, and not an order where true democracy reigned supreme; the new school needed to reflect this true democracy. Dewey called his new schools, democratic schools; they were to be schools for all with a broad social environment, broader than anything the child could experience anywhere else. The major ingredient in Dewey's school was the most interesting. Dewey believed that each student must understand objects, events and acts in ways that provide the student the means to participate in society. Dewey calls this "social intelligence."

What does it mean to have social intelligence? I think Levin would say that it has a lot to do with how much authority one has to exercise. Before one can exercise authority one must learn to wade through situations via study, inquiry, debate, discussion and decision. This is democracy at its purest; it is a process that involves conflict and disagreement that leads to agreement and decision. Trustworthy authority is that authority that withstands challenges. Levin writes, "We cannot abolish authority, or give it away, but we can and should create in our institutions the conditions that allow authority to be challenged, and to be taken over by others who are ready to use it well, because it is what is required for a democratic society to operate." This is what builds social intelligence and provides the means to act in ways that are participatory in society. If we do not allow this action to exist in our schools how, then, can we hope to have it prevalent in our society.

If we remove social intelligence from our schools then we produce a culture void of debate, disagreement and conflict. At first glance, some would say this is Utopia; but upon closer examination, this is anything but Utopia. A culture where everyone gets along and no one argues is a culture dominated by one idea, and one where all other ideas are banished. The education we offer our children carries with it our statement on issues like authority. The discipline we use in our schools with our students communicates to them our views on authority and who gets to be involved in the decision making process. Does this mean that we turn over control of our schools to our students? No, and Levin would not advocate such an action either. But, he would say that a good idea is still a good idea whether it comes from a faculty member, a principal, a student or a parent. Levin writes that, "We can start to treat students as community members with a stake in what happens, and as people who can and will learn as they deliberate and act."

In sum, Levin advocates and Dewey would agree that the practice of democracy is tied closely to a school and its program. The decisions we make are made in the deepest parts of our souls. Often, when we are apathetic in regard to a decision we need only look within for the reason why. Levin believes that for a democracy to develop a realistic stance toward the world that democracy must require and produce high ideals, and high ideals are only found deep in your soul. Their formation begins in the early stages of development inside the process of learning... inside education.

Ideals are not formed by math, science or English, but by the teaching of those subjects to a student by an adult who is trusted to instill this information. It is the process, but it is much more. It is also the relationship between a teacher and a student that builds ideals in conjunction with the family. This teacher/student relationship is one of the first relationships built outside of the family structure. The student will learn about trust, respect and empathy in this relationship as the student experiences things first hand. It is this process that actually teaches ideals more than the products of the disciplines taught. This is where we create the ideals that provide us the foundation to make the hard decisions that ultimately build individual character and trustworthiness. Dewey linked education with democracy because education produces democracy, and a democracy will only work correctly if those living by it live according to deep rooted ideals like character and truth.

Can democracy survive without education? Dewey and Levin have their answers. What is yours?