Democracy and Education Reconsidered

Dewey After One Hundred Years

Jim Garrison, Stefan Neubert, Kersten Reich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317380535
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Democracy and Education Reconsidered highlights the continued relevance of John Dewey's Democracy and Education while also examining the need to reconstruct and re-contextualize Dewey's educational philosophy for our time. The authors propose ways of revising Dewey's thought in light of the challenges facing contemporary education and society, and address other themes not touched upon heavily in Dewey's work, such as racism, feminism, post-industrial capitalism, and liquid modernity. As a final component, the authors integrate Dewey's philosophy with more recent trends in scholarship, including pragmatism, post-structuralism, and the works of other key philosophers and scholars.

1

EDUCATION AS A NECESSITY OF LIFE

Every living creature is mortal and must perish. It is no different for human beings. We seldom pause to reflect on this fact of human existence, although every adult is more or less aware of it. Almost no one ever makes the connection to education, although it is perfectly evident and immensely important. It is why Dewey titles the opening section of his first chapter “Renewal of Life by Transmission.” Humanity reproduces itself in two ways, biologically and culturally. Without biological reproduction, we would vanish as a species. Without cultural reproduction, all our cultural accomplishments upon which our biological preservation now depends, including all the meanings that live in language, the moral beliefs and values that help preserve our social group, the knowledge we have acquired across millennia, and much more, would likewise disappear. Education is the site of cultural reproduction. Dewey’s Darwinism appears from the very beginning of the book and leads immediately to profound educational consequences.

In part, we may read Democracy and Education as an attempt to come to terms with Darwinism in the modern world; we are still struggling, which is one reason why Dewey’s book remains so relevant. In his essay, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” Dewey proclaims:

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics and religion.

(MW 4: 3)

He could have added education. Dewey strives to come to grips with a world in which everything evolves, in which there are no permanent identities for species, cultures or persons, no immutable epistemological or moral foundations, and in which there is no ultimate teleology, no perfect ideal ends or goals. All we may ever hope for are relatively enduring, stable, and reliable beliefs and values. In science, we may never expect to complete what Dewey calls “the quest for certainty” (LW 4). We may only secure well-warranted claims to knowledge. Dewey understands that Darwin’s book “precipitated a crisis” (MW 4: 3). We might call it the crisis of the modern quest for order. This crisis is inevitable because the quest for order implies the expectation to cast out ambivalence by meta-narratives that present a world that is complete, transparent and comprehensively comprehended. The crisis appears throughout the history of modernity in many forms, some of which Dewey had already addressed in his philosophical criticisms.

The developments of sciences and technologies and the age of Enlightenment strongly influenced the crises of early modernity. In our own time—which Zygmunt Bauman (2000) calls “liquid modernity” to express the fluidity of a world in all its practices, institutions, concepts, and identities—we are still struggling with problems of modernity and ambivalence, tensions between order and uncertainty, conflicts of particular interests and equal opportunities and so on.

Dewey approaches education with biological and cultural insights that are remarkably clear and straightforward. However, because of their evolutionary depth, what initially appears quite unassuming and easily understood soon becomes intricate and complex as the ideas develop.¹ To survive and thrive, every species must successfully interact with its environment to meet its needs and desires; human beings (i.e., Homo sapiens) are no exception. Dewey reminds us: “Continuity of life means continual re-adaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms” (MW4: 4). However, Dewey does not confine “life” just to the narrow biological sense. “Life,” Dewey declares, “covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and defeats, recreations and occupations” (MW 4: 5). Human nature is a part of nature; hence, not its lord and master. The arts are an expression of human intelligence. Like opposable thumbs, our intelligence evolved according to Darwinian natural selection to enable survival and reproduction. It also enables aesthetic delight and reverent awe before the unfathomable mystery that there is something rather than nothing and, for a moment, we are among the actualized possibilities of the cosmos. Culture may approach the rest of nature as a gardener wishing to cultivate their garden. Dewey once wrote:

We are led to conceive, not of the conflict between the garden and the gardener; between the natural process and the process of art dependent upon human consciousness and effort. Our attention is directed to the possibility of interpreting a narrow and limited environment in the light of a wider and more complete one,—of reading the possibilities of a part through its place in the whole. Human intelligence and effort intervene, not as opposing forces but as making this connection … [M]an is an organ of the cosmic process in effecting its own progress.

(EW 5: 38)

In the lives of human beings, culture and biology are not completely separable; nature and nurture interact and may mutually modify each other.² Dewey famously used one word, “experience,” to unify both, and to designate the entire range of human experience both individual and collective over enumerable generations.

In his essay “The Inclusive Philosophic Idea” (LW 3: 41–54), Dewey argues that the separation of natural and social/cultural often leads philosophical reflection astray and that the principle of continuity and interaction implies to start with the social in all its complexity, even when observing nature. From this perspective, philosophy and the sciences are constructions out of social-cultural and historical contexts and, as Dewey argues in “Context and Thought,” “the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context” (LW 6: 5).

For Dewey, culture emerges from nature without breach of continuity. Therefore, human culture itself is a part of nature. It is the realization of some of nature’s possibilities. We must avoid constructing a nature versus culture dualism. Although we may never reduce culture to physical or biological nature, we must never forget the dependence of the former on the latter. Nor should we forget that culture affects physical and biological nature. Deweyan pragmatism is consistent with ecological responsibility.³

Dewey identifies three plateaus of existence, each of which emerges from the matrix of the one below (see LW 1: Ch. 7). The distinction among them is “one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events” (LW 1: 200). The first plateau is that of the “physico-chemical,” whose distinctive properties are those depicted by the mathematical and mechanical systems of physics and chemistry. The second plateau is that of the “psychophysical,” which is the animate level of life involving carbon-based organic functioning studied by biology as well as the lower mental functioning of animals. The third is that of “body-minds.” It involves “association, communication, participation” that “define mind as intellect: possession of and response to meanings” (LW 1: 209). This is the familiar level of culture and the social construction of cognition, of linguistic meaning, and logical essences. Dewey explains:

But body-mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation. In the hyphenated phrase body-mind, “body” designates the continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate while “mind” designates … a wider, more complex and interdependent situation.

(LW 1: 217)

Each plateau actualizes the potential of the plateau below much as water (H2O) extinguishes many kinds of combustion while hydrogen (H) is highly combustible and oxygen (O) sustains combustion. You cannot reduce one level to the next without losing essential properties.

The three plateaus accord well with Dewey’s philosophical principles of continuity and interaction. Dewey is not a reductive materialist. We cannot reduce minds to brains and it is an even worse mistake to try to reduce minds to Turing machines (i.e., computers). Pain and fear have a neuro-physiological biological base, but the meaning of pain is not reducible to neurons firing any more than the meaning of the color “red” is reducible to 7100 Angstroms (see LW 15: 113). It is one thing to have an experience; it is another thing to have a meaningful experience. When the same neurons are firing in two different people, one may find it meaningless agony while another may find divine inspiration through participating in the passion of Christ.

The distinction of the three plateaus is useful, but it is only an observer perspective from a social and cultural standpoint and context and not reified as a simple realistic account of existence in the sense of epistemological copy theory. This is problematic because it reduces observer perspectives to a simplified overview of connected fields for specific observation. This may reflect established research divisions and habits in modern science, but according to the philosophical principle of continuity we must insist that what happens between such possible plateaus is as important as what happens within. Therefore, we might equally distinguish a multitude of other fields of observation. This would lead to the distinction of any number of possible plateaus—as sciences in all their diversity show—and thus some philosophers even speak of a “thousand plateaus” implying that the task of identifying plateaus is infinite (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1988).⁴

Dewey sometimes shows a tendency to over-universalize his interpretations as an observer and fails to acknowledge distant observer perspectives—for instance, when he rather unqualifiedly compares “civilization” and “savage tribes” with regard to educational functions (see MW 9: 5, 6, 52). While Dewey’s pluralism implies he is usually ready and willing to change perspectives from the self-to the distant-observer stance, his failure to do so in his “civilization” versus “savage tribes” divide causes some to detect an occasional, subtle, and unintended racism in Dewey’s thought (see, e.g., Sullivan, 2006 and Fallace, 2011).⁵ In these parts of his text we can observe an influence of Western mainstream thought to portray all cultures on one plateau or—as influenced by the historical experiences of colonialism—on different plateaus that constitute a stairway from lower to higher positions. This concept of a stairway to modernization downplays the diversity and incommensurability of cultures that Dewey seems to become more aware of in his later writings (cf. MW 11: 41–54; LW 10).

The transmission of experience among individuals within a generation and collective experience across generations is a matter of communication. Dewey is a pioneer in anticipating the paramount import of communication for twentieth-century education. He observes:

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—like-mindedness as the sociologists say.

(MW 9: 7, original italics)

Fundamentally, communication involves creatively working together to make something in common. Communion requires more than just cognitive verbal communication:

This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive.

(MW 9: 7)

Communication involves emotional and intellectual dispositions, and for Dewey both are equally important to healthy human functioning and development. We cannot think our world properly unless we can feel it appropriately and we cannot feel it appropriately unless we think it properly.

Dewey wishes to avoid the great vice of intellectualism. “By ‘intellectualism’ as an indictment,” he writes, “is meant the theory that all experiencing is a mode of knowing” (LW 1: 28). We sustain many relations to existence, including doubt, joy, melancholy, despair, tragedy, reverence, amusement, fear, confusion, and hope. Further, we may communicate these relationships with the world and with each other unconsciously and below the level of cognition. Sympathy for others is as primordial as anger, and we often communicate our feeling in ways beyond words; indeed, such communication often betrays the emptiness of mere intellectual meaning and knowing as anyone that has ever loved surely knows.

Non-cognitive feelings and embodied habits of response that perform intelligent functions involving “know-how” instead of conscious propositional cognition (i.e., “knowing that”) are dispositions to act that constitute the content of our character and the correctness of our actions as much as, and often more than, abstract principles and concepts. Very young children and the profoundly cognitively impaired may “read” their parents and teachers even when they cannot read a book.

Once we understand communication at depth, we may appreciate how communicative interactions among individuals reciprocally constitute everyone in the community that participates:

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. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing …

(MW 9: 8)

Following these insights about the fundamental relation of education and communication, we must reject the confines of the conduit metaphor of communication and with it computer metaphors of the mind and self. We do not simply encode information and then send it down a pipe for a passive recipient to decode it at the other end.⁶ Communication involves active interpretation, which includes misinterpretation, and the reciprocally transforming co-construction of meaning. Further, we communicate feelings as well as thoughts, and we cannot encode feeling in bits and bites of information. Dewey thought that except for “commonplaces and catch phrases [and bits of information] one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another’s experience in order to tell him intelligently of one’s own experience. All communication is like art” (MW 9: 9). In complete communication, we constructively create shared meanings together. It involves emotional perception, social awareness, and having a “feel” for the other person in a shared situation. Empathy must abound. In performing all these complex reticulated functions, we co-create (reciprocally transform) each other. Dewey has an emergent theory of communication. Communication involves information, but we must avoid reducing all communication to information processing. It is that, but much more than that. Dewey observes that communication has instrumental as well as consummatory (i.e., immediately fulfilling) aspects. With regard to the latter, he also uses the term “final”:

Communication is uniquely instrumental and uniquely final. It is instrumental as liberating us from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling us to live in a world of things that have meaning. It is final as a sharing in the objects and arts precious to a community, a sharing whereby meanings are enhanced, deepened and solidified … communication and its congenial objects … are worthy as means, because they are the only means that make life rich and varied in meanings. They are worthy as ends, because in such ends man is lifted from his immediate isolation and shares in a communion of meanings.

(LW 1: 159)

Meanings have an aesthetic as well as instrumental aspect. In Chapter 3, we will explore this further.

Because social life depends upon communication, “not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates” (MW 9: 9). Schooling is only a small part of education. Most of what we know, believe, and value we learned elsewhere by participating in social practices involving family, friends, public institutions, media, and more. Here we have the source of Dewey’s now familiar distinction between formal and informal education (MW 9: 12).

Informal education is an incidental, even accidental, and often inadvertent hodgepodge of learning by living, working, and playing together that is, nonetheless, quite meaningful even if rather chaotic. However, institutions designed for specific practical purpose structure society. These purposes educate in a more structured way. To participate in an organized social practice, we must acquire the appropriate intellectual habits and emotional dispositions. Participating in organized religion is a good example; so too is economic participation.

At first, institutions achieve their purposes without conscious reflection upon their consequences beyond those explicitly intended:

While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.

(MW 9: 9)

For instance, organized religion arose to “secure the favor of overruling powers” (MW 9: 9). What Dewey means is that initially any social institution simply serves as a means to securing some socially valued experience as its ideal end. At first, this is done unreflectively according to the established customs of a given culture. However, all human action has unintended as well as intended consequences. Among these are the effects of institutions on the lives and consciousness of people participating in them. It is one thing for an institution, or an individual participating in it, to do something for a purpose, it is another to become self-consciously aware of what pursuing, and perhaps securing, that purpose truly means. Eventually, we may become reflectively aware of “the quality and extent of conscious life,” and eventually this awarenes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Education as a Necessity of Life
• 2. Education as a Social Function
• 3. Education as Interaction and Communication
• 4. Education as Growth
• 5. The Democratic Conception in Education
• 6. Aims and Competencies in Education
• 7. Interest, Discipline, and Power
• 8. Contents, Methods, and Relationships in Education
• 9. Class, Race, Gender, and Disability
• 10. Capitals as Contexts for Education
• 11. The Way to Democratic Inclusion
• 12. Philosophy as Education: From Pragmatism to Constructivism
• References
• Index