2 Introduction to John Dewey’s Pedagogical Philosophy

We will be reading John Dewey’s lectures given in 1938 and published as Experience & Education.  If you begin reading without any introduction, you’ll likely feel that you are entering into the middle of a conversation and that you missed the set up.

In 1916, Dewey published a 24-chapter, in-depth pedagogical treatise: Democracy and Education.  The ideas published there galvanized an intellectual and societal shift from “traditional” to “progressive” ideas about education.

The first chapter of Experience and Education begins with Dewey addressing the debate between “traditional” and “progressive” models of education.  In short, “progressive” refers to Dewey’s own ideas, which by the time E&E was published, had become quite influential.  By “traditional,” Dewey means the sort of ‘top-down’ education that was — prior to his influence — the norm in American schools.

Why Dewey’s educational philosophy is called “progressive” should become clear as you read E&E, but, to give you a quick leg up: “progressive” isn’t exactly the same as politically “left-leaning” (though there is surely important overlap between “progressive” educators and “progressive,” democratic political ideas).

For Dewey, progressive means that education is lifelong and, fundamentally, teaches us how to continue to learn.  Education aims not toward a goal but toward aims — aims that we develop from our own intrinsic interests (individual and social, inextricably linked) and that we strive toward, though we may never achieve them.  Indeed, to achieve an aim would be somewhat counter-productive: if you perceive that you have accomplished the purpose of your education, then you would stop learning and growing.  For Dewey, that would be the worst possible outcome for the individual (and for society, especially a democratic society).

The terms “progressive” and “traditional” can be a little confusing for us, because progressive education was, for a time in the early 20th century, widely accepted as the correct model for public education in the United States.  (So, it has been an historical if not a “traditional” part of the story of education in the U.S., and there is a robust tradition of progressivism in the history of U.S. education.)   Both before and then again after that time, however, “traditional” models have dominated in both policy and practice.  Meanwhile, some “progressive” values, educators, and schools have continued to persist throughout the 20th century and into today.  Now that I’ve possibly made that a little more confusing for you while trying to clarify, let me try to prep you a little bit for the theoretical content of Experience & Education.

I’ll post a few central ideas/quotes from Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) here.  By reading through this first, you’ll be familiar with some of the ideas that Dewey subsequently attempted to clarify in Experience & Education.

(I can’t help but add that I love this book and *highly* recommend reading the whole thing.  LMK if you want to start an “Out of the Cave” book club!)

Highlights from Democracy and Education:

• The defining feature of animate objects is that they *renew* or *grow.*
• Education is how society *renews* and *grows* beyond the lifespan of any single individual person.
• “Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.” (4)
• “Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.  To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.” (5)
• “A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account.  For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies.” (12)
• Dewey states that most “education” happens outside of “school” — in family and other fundamental social environments.  “What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise…. and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning.” (17)
• “We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment.” (19)
• Dewey emphasizes the importance of innate, intrinsic interest as the key factor in motivating learning: “Purely external direction is impossible.  Teh environment can at most only supply stimuli to call out responses… which proceed from tendencies already possessed by the individual.” (25)
• Education is growth.  Education, like growth, *is* the end, it doesn’t *have* an end. (49) (See below on ends and aims.)
• Education as growth is especially important in a democracy: “The realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education.” (87)
• John Dewey distinguishes between results or goals and ends in education (100-104). Results accrue and goals are met without continuity whereas ends give direction to an activity.  For Dewey, ends are organized toward aims. Aims “must be an outgrowth of existing conditions” (104), should be flexible, not rigid, and direct activity toward a “freeing of activity” (105) and so incorporate but also extend beyond ends.  Aims harness the interest of the student and infuse each end with meaning, making the overall educational experience relevant to the student’s life.
• “Even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of concrete situations in which they find themselves.” (107)
• “To ‘learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.  Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction — discovery of the connections of things.” (140)
• “To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done0for thing, is not to think.  It is turn ourselves into a piece of registering apparatus.” (147)
• “Hence, the first approach to learning in any subject in school, if thought is to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible.” (154)
• “Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless) of energies.” (167)
• “The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field.  The egagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical.”
• “Philosophy might almost be described as thinking which has become conscious of itself — which has generalized its place, function, and value in experience.”
• “There is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be good; he must be good for something.  The something for which a man must be good is the capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from living with others balances with what he contributed….  What gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is not external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious life — a more intense, disciplined, and expanded realization of meanings.”

For further clarification, I like:

Dewey & Democracy by Barbara Schecter

and John Dewey at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.