One of the greatest minds in history. A philosopher, his concern was democracy and its ideals. A thinker about the problems in education. A prominent voice in America, commanding the admiration of those who agreed with his views, and respect for his mind even from those who did not. The man: John Dewey, an American philosopher. Dewey’s pedagogy was one with three distinctive traits: it was democratic in that it called for pluralism. It was a follower of the scientific method in that it was a systemic approach at solving problems and forming judgments, both practical and moral.
It prized directed experience as an ongoing process of means as ends and ends as means. These three traits of Dewey’s philosophy are tied to all that he wrote and thought. Dewey felt that democracy was the ideal social structure, the one best suited to the needs and aims of all people; under no other political scheme was it possible for general citizens to have allowance and responsibility to grow individually and culturally. All other systems hindered personal and social growth in Dewey’s scheme.
Any form of despotic state used fear to such an extent that it became one of the only factors that kept the state in union, and the other factors that would naturally cause people to work together in their social environments were perverted and wasted. “Instead of operating on their own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain” (DE, 84). The cultural paralysis was seen in the fact that “there is no free play back and forth among the members of the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided.
Both the rich and poor suffer: the poor in that they have little involvement in the courses taken in their lives; the rich in that their “culture becomes sterile” (DE, 84). Dewey asserted that “democracy has always been allied with humanism, with faith in the potentials of human nature” and that “democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail. ” He advised that democracy is not something that will necessarily happen if “human nature is left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restriction” (FC, 97). Democracy, for Dewey, was a moral issue that required efforts born in democratic vision.
Democracy was Dewey’s tool of progress. But Dewey also saw that democracy did not guarantee progress. The imperative of democracy in education was obvious from Dewey’s point of view: if a democratic society wants to train its children in the ways of democracy, schools would need to incorporate democratic methods into their systems. For Dewey, schools were responsible for developing democratic dispositions and tools: acute social awareness; critical assessments of existing social institutions; skepticism; voluntary cooperation.
In the end, the best tool for democracy, which was highly democratic in Dewey’s view, was the scientific method. Dewey saw in democracy, aided with these tools of enlightenment, the social structure most capable of growing, progressing, in an ethical and humane way. He wrote, “As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is the chief agency for the accomplishment of this end” (DE, 20).
The school was for much of Dewey’s life the primary source of progress in a dynamic democracy. Because Dewey’s faith in democracy was so strong, and because he was not so optimistic to think that people would always and naturally make good decisions, he was compelled to put education high on his list of social priorities. Dewey felt that it was essential that the public be enlightened with knowledge; moreover, Dewey laid more emphasis on judgment than the mere accumulation of facts: people were to have the best method of forming good judgments.
That method was the scientific method. Pointing out that “emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason” (FC, 16), Dewey argued that democracy needs a public that is able to make decisions rationally. Since “credulity is natural” (DE, 188), leading to dogmatism which is antagonistic to democracy, a system to counter-act the tendency was needed. The scientific method, the most efficient and effective way to form accurate approximations at truth, was the perfect tool.
Dewey defined the scientific method as a systemic approach at forming hypothesis about our world or forming judgments for making decisions to solve problems. Broken down, the method involves (i) a problem or difficulty which is presented to a person; (ii) imaginative and tentative ideas concerning actions and meanings that could solve the difficulty. These ideas are procured from past experiences similar to the current situation, or from reasonable guesses; (iii) experimentation with ideas upon the situation; (iv) reflection and evaluation.
The results are judged, meaning is gained, and the process repeats and continues until a working solution is found. Understanding this method gives Dewey’s conception of democracy potency. Dewey saw this method as the way for individuals to empower themselves and society to progress. With the powerful objective nature of this method, useless and harmful institutions and ideas could be discarded from a society.
Education has accordingly not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mindits rashness, presumption and preference with what chimes with self-interest to objective evidencebut also to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages” (HWT, 25). A by-product of the pre-scientific philosophical habit was the tendency to glorify the End over the Means used to get there.
But by doing so, philosophers and people in general were blind to the continuity between the twothere is no essential difference between the two unless there really is a distinction between our world of Matter and some other world called Spirit which is somehow more real. Since Dewey saw no distinctionour world is definitely realhe found ends and means to be of the same nature. Dewey wrote: “In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be obtained and possessed.
When one has such a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which is alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the aim leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it.
Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could” (DE, 105-106). The implications for education were far-reaching. Subjects and facts could not be forced on students in a way that alienated the topics from their meanings.
A teacher could not implore his students to study history because history was in itself ultimately important: a teacher had to show what the study of history did to empower and broaden a student’s mind and activities. Dewey was against the stockpiling of facts if it was done without purpose and connection with the individual. There are so many facts that could be known, but it would be beyond our capabilities to know them all. Dewey felt that creating a static list of things to know was an inefficient way to educate.
The process of arbitrarily deciding exactly what facts were to be learned was inefficient in that many of the facts learned would never make useful connections to the lives of people. Better to learn facts as one pursues some goal, as the facts become directly relevant. Otherwise facts gained only have the potential to gain meaning, and many facts will turn out to be disconnected, never finding their place in a person’s experience. Facts grow naturally out of meaningful experience, but meaningful experience which leads to more facts do not necessarily flow from facts.
Dewey wrote that “the tragic weakness of the present school is that it endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently wanting” (SSCC, 15). The conditions wanting were democracy, rational judgment conducive of the scientific method, and a conception of experience that recognizes the continuous nature of ends as means of further action. What Dewey wanted was ideal, but it was not utopian. He knew that we should do better, that we could do better. The question was more whether there was a will to do better.
