Teaching in the Now

John Dewey on the Educational Present

Jeff Frank

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781557538062
• eBook ISBN: 9781612495903
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

John Dewey's Experience and Education is an important book, but first-time readers of Dewey's philosophy can find it challenging and not meaningfully related to the contemporary landscape of education. Jeff Frank's Teaching in the Now aims to reanimate Dewey's text—for first-time readers and anyone who teaches the text or is interested in appreciating Dewey's continuing significance—by focusing on Dewey's thinking on preparation. Frank, through close readings of Dewey, asks readers to wonder: How much of what we justify as preparation in education is actually necessary? That is, every time we catch ourselves telling a student—you need to learn this in order to do something else—we need to stop and reflect. We need to reflect, because when we always justify the present moment of a student's education in terms of what will happen in the future, we may lose out on the ability to engage students' attention and interest now, when it matters. Dewey asks his readers to trust that the best way to prepare students for an engaging and productive future is to create the most engaging and productive present experience for students. We learn to live fully in the future, only by practicing living fully in the present. Although it can feel scary to stop thinking of the work of education in terms of preparation, when educators reclaim the present for students, new opportunities—for teachers, students, schools, democracy, and education—emerge. Teaching in the Now explores these opportunities in impassioned and engaging prose that makes Experience and Education come alive for readers new to Dewey or who have taught and read him for many years.

CHAPTER 1

Opening Complexities

John Dewey (2008h) opens Experience and Education with this thought: “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities” (LW.13.5).¹ It is telling and important that in Dewey’s final major work on education he begins by reminding us that mankind likes to think in opposites, but Dewey does not. Telling, because John Dewey has been vilified or praised for positions that he does not hold,² and important because though Dewey’s thinking—or the idea of Dewey—may provoke strong reactions, Dewey aimed to invite thought beyond the simplistic dualistic categorizations we are all too apt to rely on and engage with when thinking. Thinking is difficult, and because Dewey’s writing is meant to provoke thought that asks us to step outside of habituated modes of thinking, Dewey’s work is difficult. I mention this at the outset, because it is important to know what we are getting into. We may have a vague sense of what Dewey is—progressive, liberal, anti-religion, instrumentalist, pragmatist—but these labels often say more about an unwillingness to think with Dewey than it does about what Dewey thinks. For this reason, I aim to offer what Philip Jackson (2002) calls “an appreciative exegesis” (p. 167) of John Dewey on the present: appreciative, because Dewey continues to remain relevant to education; exegetical, because his thought is often challenging to understand and needs interpretive work before it is seen to be as relevant as it is.

Reading appreciatively is not to claim that Dewey is infallible; but, it is to say that the present study will focus on one aspect of his thinking—the educational present—that I believe he gets right in a profoundly important way. This will be the focus of my work. My aim is to think with Dewey on the educational present, ignoring labels that often obscure more than they illuminate, sticking closely to his texts with an eye toward showing why we should take Dewey’s thought as seriously as possible.

In addition to recognizing how complex Dewey’s thought is because it goes against the grain of the labels we often want to attribute and affix to Dewey, there is a second difficulty. David Hawkins (2000) puts the point nicely: “It is not easy to criticize Dewey, because when you do you usually find that he has made the necessary qualifications somewhere else in his vast writings” (p. 109). Dewey’s collected works are vast, and Dewey often rewrote sections of his major works when he realized he was mistaken. It is hard to criticize Dewey because closer readings of Dewey will generally show that Dewey anticipates and overcomes our objections. Because of this, there is a tendency to underappreciate Dewey’s complexity in order to make—or score—a point.³ As readers of Dewey, I think it is important that we hold off arguing against, or throwing our full support behind, Dewey and attempt to read Dewey closely, letting his writing expand the ways we think about education and our students.

Finally, Dewey always believed that good educational writing reconstructs the theory/practice divide. There is writing that is merely theoretical in education—that is, work that has next to nothing to do with the life of schools or classrooms—and there is writing that may be found immediately useful, but which doesn’t offer grounds for thinking and continued growth as an educator. Dewey hoped to avoid both ends of this polarity, as do I. In particular, I want Dewey’s thinking on the present to help teachers think about their classroom in new ways and creatively and critically engage with Dewey’s thinking on the educational present to reconstruct the ways they teach and think about teaching. To do this, I aim to do justice to Dewey’s thought, without becoming mired in scholarly details and debates that can prove distracting, while also making connections to classroom practices as I understand and experience them.

This approach, I acknowledge, can be frustrating to both parties: not enough scholarship for some, not enough definite direction and guidance for others. This is a risk worth taking, an experiment that Dewey enacted each time he wrote. And, I am inspired by the success of work in this vein from before Dewey and into the present. There are too many to mention them all, so I instead want to focus on one model that I find particularly worth aspiring to, and close to my own project. Carol Rodgers (2002) effectively reconstructs the theory practice dualism in her work on Dewey’s vision of reflection. Rodgers offers an accurate and compelling reading of Dewey that wears its learning unobtrusively, and it also offers practicing teachers and teacher educators much to think about when it comes to Dewey and their own practices. Again, I could name others who do this work as well,⁴ but highlight Rodgers (2002) because her ability to think with Dewey in a way that speaks very directly to the practice of teaching and teacher education is most like what I hope to accomplish here.⁵

This is just a brief snapshot of how I will approach the complexity of Dewey’s thinking in this book. In the following sections of this chapter I begin discussing the complexities of certain themes that we will return to throughout the book.

The Present: Finding a Way Between Quietism and Instrumentalism

One major motivation behind writing this book is a genuine and provocative puzzlement experienced in my classroom as we read books like Democracy and Education and Experience and Education and Dewey begins to address the purposes of schooling as it relates to a student’s future. My students are, understandably so, concerned about their own futures, and they find it surprising that Dewey seems to downplay the importance of preparing for that future. Students who have just spent tremendous time, energy, and stress focused on preparing for the future of college that is now their present are not quite sure what to make of Dewey’s assertion that the best preparation for the future is living in the fullness of the present. Beyond wondering what this might mean, there is the added feeling that Dewey can’t be right; the feeling that there must be some importance, even some meaning, behind the drudgery they just endured in the name of preparing. Or else why—why?—would so many trusted adults insist upon the necessity of that preparation, an experience that often felt nothing like living in the fullness of the present?

Here is how Dewey (2008e) puts it in Democracy and Education:

The mistake is not in attaching importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation for a continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of. (MW.9.61)

In many ways, this quote is an excellent representation of how one might read Dewey closely so as to expand his significance for education. The formulation here is careful and precise, but it is also complex, and so lack of attention can lead a reader to walk away from this passage and into dualistic thinking. That is, we may read this passage and feel that Dewey is not interested—even against—preparing for the future. We can focus on the idea that “every energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant as possible” and so conclude that Dewey is against preparing students for the future. But, this cannot be the case, because, “the need of preparation for a continually developing life is great.” The picture is more complex than Dewey being against preparing for the future; he causes us to think about how the future can be “taken care of” by a life lived fully in the present.

Another way of getting at this complexity is to think about the instrumentalist dimensions of Dewey’s thinking as weighed against what I would call the quietist side of living in the present. Dewey’s instrumentalism can be briefly described as the idea that thinking is largely motivated by problems we confront in the world. When we find ourselves in a problem-situation, thought is activated to solve the problem. In this picture of thinking, we can see how inquiry is driven by, if not defined as, problem-solving. The use of thought is instrumental to the solving of problems.⁶ To return to the example of my college students, getting to college is a problem that one uses thought to solve. The problem is getting into the best college; the solution is doing what it takes to get into that best college. Things like SAT tutoring, taking courses that one has little interest in but “look good,” and doing “service work” are all instrumental to getting into the best college. Now, Dewey’s picture cannot be this simplistic, but the fact remains that Dewey’s thinking is geared toward bringing about a better—rather than a worse—future.

Saying this, thinking must be future-directed or oriented to the future, and this seems to fly in the face of what I am calling the quietist side of Dewey’s thinking on the present.⁷ That is, Dewey seems to imply that living fully in the present will be the preparation that one needs for the future. Being fully engrossed in a book, or a painting, or nature; losing time in the flow of conversation or inquiry;⁸ experiencing wonder, awe, and love;⁹ practicing mindfulness:¹⁰ This is life lived meaningfully in the present. Living in the present is the centerpiece of many spiritual practices, and these practices are often explicitly unconcerned with what will happen in the future, leaving the future to a will that transcends the individual.

A compelling statement of this view can be found in Tolstoy’s (1912/1997b) November 17th entry in his Calendar of Wisdom: “There is no past and no future; no one has ever entered those two imaginary kingdoms. There is only the present. Do not worry about the future, because there is no future. Live in the present and for the present, and if your present is good, then it is good forever” (p. 334).¹¹ In a very real way Tolstoy is correct—there is only the present, and so living fully in the present takes care of the future, because the future will only be our next present—but this type of stance can become problematic, because it may lead to a quietism that ignores the very real dangers of complacency and injustice. That is, if I am cultivating the fullness of my present, I can be insensitive to the reality that there may be a great deal of (white) privilege involved in this cultivation that can lead me to forget that I can live my spiritual practices because of structural injustices.¹² But, farmer and author Wendell Berry (2015) offers a useful counterpoint to this way of thinking when he notes: “maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it” (p. 175). Here the thinking is—and this is a line of thought Tolstoy would endorse—we cannot stop injustice writ large, but we can practice justice in the relationships and interactions we live each day. Or, to put it in slogan form: Don’t worry about the fate of mankind—something we cannot control—worry about the present you are living!

Dewey is complexly somewhere in the middle of all of this with his thinking on the present. Though Dewey has the intellectual humility to know the limitations of how an individual’s thought and action can shape the future, he believes we must try to bring about the future we envision. It is through human will, thinking, and effort that we bring about our desired future, and thus we have an obligation to create the future we hope for. At the same time, mere instrumentalism—sacrificing the quality of our present experience for a distant future—is equally misguided. Here a reader may wonder: Isn’t it clear that Dewey wants it both ways? And, I think the only answer is: Yes. Dewey wants us to live savingly in the present, but he also wants to save the future.

These stances aren’t mutually exclusive, but it is extraordinarily difficult to have it both ways, despite Dewey’s assertion that “as the present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.” We create democracy by living democratically in the present; we create meaningful learning experiences by giving students meaningful work in the present; we prepare a student for the intellectual work demanded in college by having students do intellectually demanding work in the present.¹³ These can all be stated clearly, but I want to be clear that these are ideals that take will, creativity, and intelligence to enact. In the following chapters I will show how this can happen; for present purposes, I want to give a brief overview of this complexity so that we can be mindful of it as we begin engaging in a more sustained way with Dewey’s thinking on the educational present.

Orientation to an Open Future

Another important complexity to be mindful of is Dewey’s thinking about the openness of the future. Dewey was of the mind that preparation for the future was often fruitless because the future we are preparing for is in the process of being created. If we prepare for the future based on our experience of the past, we may be preparing for a world that doesn’t exist.¹⁴ Here is how Dewey puts the point (2008g) in a book review:

There are many points of view from which the Victorian age may be regarded, and as many corresponding definitions of its essence. One of these definitions, at least as true as the others, is that it regarded the present as the culmination, the apogee, of the past. Hence its complacency. Today we think of the present as the preparation for a future; hence our disturbed uncertainty. (LW.6.280)

There are two dangers in this passage: complacency and “disturbed uncertainty.” We know that the world is changing quickly. In the past, many could prepare for a job that was destined for them, through family connection or social station, and could rest complacent knowing that they didn’t have to do much other than follow the path laid down and trod before them to live successfully. Now, this certainty—for what seems like a growing number of people—no longer exists. Importantly, it is very easy to move from disturbed uncertainty about the future to something like militant nostalgia. I think we can see this very clearly in things like the Brexit decision and the 2016 Presidential election in the United States. Instead of working with the reality of our changing world, very large numbers of people believe that we can, and should, return to an imagined world where there was more certainty and security (at least for white men).¹⁵ Instead of being open to our changing present and using intelligence to build a desired future from this present, nostalgia reigns.

Here, again, is a tension and a place where Dewey’s ideals and beliefs are very clear. Dewey was not afraid of change and he saw it as natural and something that should be worked with and shaped to our ideals. Dewey was anything but nostalgic; this doesn’t mean, of course, that he is irreverent or aims to destroy things people value for the sake of destruction.¹⁶ But, he does believe that things only get stronger the more responsive they are to the reality of change and growth. This very idea—as seen by the bitter dismissal of Dewey by some conservative and conservative Christian critics¹⁷—can feel threatening, but I don’t think this needs to be the case.

Though Dewey’s views may seem to be more suited to liberal nonbelievers, I think it is far more inclusive and interesting than that. Dewey is interested in bringing about the best possible lives for the greatest number of people, and he invited the opportunity to work with anyone...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: Thinking With Dewey
• Introduction: Waiting
• Chapter 1: Opening Complexities
• Chapter 2: The Future Depends on the Quality of the Present
• Chapter 3: Ideals and Experiments: Creating the Present
• Chapter 4: We Make the Self by Living
• Conclusion: Futures for the Present
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index