Democratic Education and the Public Sphere

Towards John Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience

Masamichi Ueno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138832824
• eBook ISBN: 9781317564942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This book considers John Dewey's philosophy of democratic education and his theory of public sphere from the perspective of the reconstruction and redefinition of the dominant liberalist movement. By bridging art education and public sphere, and drawing upon contemporary mainstream philosophies, Ueno urges for the reconceptualization of the education of mainstream liberalism and indicates innovative visions on the public sphere of education.

Focusing on Dewey's theory of aesthetic education as an origin of the construction of public sphere, chapters explore his art education practices and involvement in the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia, clarifying the process of school reform based on democratic practice. Dewey searched for an alternative approach to public sphere and education by reimagining the concept of educational right from a political and ethical perspective, generating a collaborative network of learning activities, and bringing imaginative meaning to human life and interaction. This book proposes educational visions for democracy and public sphere in light of Pragmatism aesthetic theory and practice.

Democratic Education and the Public Sphere will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate studies in the fields of the philosophy of education, curriculum theory, art education, and educational policy and politics. The book will also be of interest to policy makers and politicians who are engaged in educational reform.

1
Democracy and the Public Sphere

A Critique of Liberalism and Its Politics

In the 1920s, Dewey considered education from the perspective of democracy and the public sphere, and tackled school reform as a central issue. He attempted to reconstruct the civil society of traditional liberalism, and searched for ways to rebuild democratic education and the public sphere. During the periods between progressivism and the Great Depression, and the two World Wars, the US encountered societal changes such as industrialization, urbanization, technological advances and the progress of mass society. Those factors made changes to people’s lives and sets of values unavoidable. Moreover, the huge industrial organizations that appeared against the background of the expan sion of mass production and consumption led to the unprecedented development of capitalism, which contributed to bringing the US towards the centre of the world economy and to the enjoyment of glorifying prosperity.

However, the huge growth of the organization and systemization of business enveloped society, and eroded people’s daily lives. Lewis Mumford analysed critically that man himself becomes “goods” and “the machine” with the birth of huge organizations by mechanization.¹ Instead of communication with people of visible individuality, depersonalized relations with the anonymous constituted interpersonal relations in society, and social adaptation to an efficiency-driven system that concentrated on the production and consumption of goods came to form the dominant lifestyle. The concept of Dewey’s public philosophy was prepared to face such societal changes. Dewey regarded the decline of face-to-face relations as “the eclipse of the public,” and was engaged in reconstructing an “articulate public” through democratic education.²

Conventionally, Dewey’s public education theory tends to be interpreted within the framework of liberalism and it is subject to attack, especially his concept of nature and naturalism, from the following three directions. The first is opposition from neoconservatism. According to E. D. Hirsch, Dewey emphasizes as the cornerstone of his theory the educational view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who made children’s “natural growth” the ultimate goal, and therefore did not fully recognize the public mission of an adult who conveys “cultural literacy” to children.³ The second is criticism by neoliberalism. John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe pay attention to Dewey’s theory in the form of the rejection of progressive education. Their opposition to progressive education focuses on the bureaucratic control of educational systems that this movement has built in an artificial way. They position the marketization of nineteenth-century liberalism as a natural control system of opposite poles, and advocate the advancement of educational reform that maximizes competition among schools and the role of choices.⁴ The third is criticism from Marxism of the extension of revisionist approaches. According to William A. Paringer, the naturalism that forms the basis of Dewey’s liberal educational thought is unable to meet the challenge of fitting into the existing industrial structure, since it would conceal and melt various ideological confrontations that lurk in reality.⁵ While the first and third schools reject Dewey’s naturalism, the second positions progressivism opposite naturalism. These criticisms have thrown light onto the fact that Dewey’s educational theory has been at issue for several decades now, and the concept of nature constitutes one of the key and controversial factors under discussion.

On the other hand, there has been an innovative movement to reappraise and reinterpret Dewey’s theory of democratic education and the public sphere reflecting the trend of the pragmatism renaissance since the 1980s. For instance, Westbrook strongly supports Dewey’s “democratic ideals” of “participatory democracy,” emphasizing the contrast with Walter Lippmann’s “realism” that affirms bureaucratic control by the social elite.⁶ And, according to Ryan, Dewey’s commitment to the task of building “advanced liberalism” was wedded to the idea of “communitarian strain;” in other words, “individuals need communities, and liberal communities consist of associated individuals.”⁷ However, there remains no comprehensive research on the relation between Dewey’s theory of democratic education and the public sphere that looks at the concept of nature. It is hard to say whether sufficient research on concrete school reforms in the 1920s and 1930s has accumulated, since his theory of school reform for that period was distributed throughout many papers and articles.

Dewey advocated the importance of public participation and communication by criticizing the market control or welfare state control of education, and developed innovative school reforms with democracy and the public sphere as underlying principles. The school was regarded as a central agency that fostered social change and created culture, and he investigated educational methods of democracy for creating “a way of living together.” This chapter will outline Dewey’s vision of school education in the 1920s in accordance with the principle of democracy and the public sphere. I will reinterpret his naturalism, which tended to be grasped within a framework of traditional liberalism, and reconstruct a conception of the public sphere through envisioning the conflicts and confrontations between liberalism and democracy.

Political and Ethical Naturalism

Human Nature and Conduct was published in 1922, based on Dewey’s lectures at Leland Stanford Junior University in the spring of that year. In the introduction of the book, he raised the question: “Why did morality set up rules so foreign to human nature?” He criticized the traditional notion of morality concerned with controlling human nature from a transcendental position, saying that “moral principles that exalt themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide,” or else “they involve human nature in unending civil war, and treat it as a hopeless mess of contradictory forces.”⁸ After its publication, Dewey’s ethical theory was interpreted as explaining morality from the standpoint of “naturalistic empiricism.” However, it is important to examine the notion of nature, since Dewey has been consistently criticized as defining naturalism by traditional liberalism.

Much of what is called the “individualism” of the early nineteenth century has in truth little to do with the nature of individuals. It goes back to a metaphysics which held that harmony between man and nature can be taken for granted, if certain artificial restrictions upon man are removed. Hence it neglected the necessity of studying and regulating industrial conditions so that a nominal freedom can be made an actuality. Find a man who believes that all men need is freedom from oppressive legal and political measures, and you have found a man who, unless he is merely obstinately maintaining his own private privileges, carries at the back of his head some heritage of the metaphysical doctrine of free will, plus an optimistic confidence in natural harmony.⁹

Dewey rejected the metaphysical notion of nature as the harmony between humans and nature without politics. In terms of moral philosophy, his concept of naturalism was not founded on the standpoint of classical liberalism exemplified in Locke’s theory, which assumes that “the natural state” is the one deprived of “political society,” but on the idea that “nature” is closely related to political, economic and social activity. Namely, Dewey did not share the assumption that the foundation of “human nature” is based on individuals and individual rights and freedoms, and that the concept of nature could be reduced to a state without political and social relationships. For Dewey, Locke’s moral philosophy was founded not on human communicative interaction, but rather on the concept of control in an individualistically interpreted pre-political state of nature.

Dewey sought to bring “morals to earth” by refusing to accept “the separation of morals from human nature.” For him, “the cost of confining moral freedom to an inner region” was “the almost complete severance of ethics from politics and economics,” and it reflected the “separation of moral activity from nature and the public life of men.” While a whole school of morals has flourished by “restricting morals to character” and “separating character from conduct, motives from actual deeds,” the recognition of “moral action” in analogy with “functions and arts” would eliminate the causes that understand morals from a subjective and individual viewpoint.¹⁰ Terry Hoy argues that Dewey’s notion of “a reflective morality,” which was derived from “naturalistic humanism,” grows out of “conflict between ends, responsibility, rights and duties where the task of a reflective morality is to clarify problems.” According to Hoy, the keynote of Dewey’s approach to moral inquiry was his emphasis on “the practical meaning of a situation” and “intelligence” that can avoid “the inadequacies of fixed ends and final goals.”¹¹

An effort to bring “morals to earth” was concerned with constructing ethics in view of a variety of people’s experiences and pluralistic values in the lifeworld through the denial of the metaphysical concept of nature. Hilary Putnam, who regards Dewey “as just one member of my list of ‘heroes’” and appraises Human Nature and Conduct, enthusiastically proposes the idea of “pragmatic pluralism,” also called “ethics without ontology” or “ethics without metaphysics.” One reason why Putnam sees Dewey as belonging to his “list of ‘heroes’” is because Dewey emphasized that “the function of ethics” is not to “arrive at ‘universal principles,’” nor to “produce ‘system,’” but to “contribute to the solution of practical problems.” For Putnam, Dewey’s ethics rested not on “a single interest or aim” deriving from “a system of principles,” but rather on “a system of interrelated concerns” that would be mutually supported, but with the potential for tension: he calls it “motley,” following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s term.¹²

Dewey reconstructed concepts relating to the ethics of rights, freedom and morality not from the idea of “natural harmony,” but from political and social processes and practices of the creation of pluralistic values that emerge from interactive experiences in the world. Destroying the “fixed distinction” between the human and the physical, as well as that between the moral and the political, was seen as a measure to accomplish this. He claimed that one needed to turn from moral theories to the “human struggle for political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought, speech, assemblage and creed,” and that through these processes, one would find himself “out of the stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the open-air world.”¹³ In the face of the industrialization, urbanization and realization of mass society in the 1920s, it was not appropriate to call on primitive naturalism; rather, there was a demand to propose a new concept of politics and ethics.

The Reconstruction of the Public Sphere: Market, Nature and Democracy

The Public and Its Problems was written from the standpoint of embodying the concepts of democracy and the public sphere. It was Dewey’s consistent insistence in the 1920s that the assumption of an ultimately harmonious state between humans and nature without political society was not adequate, and that Locke’s liberal idea of a natural state had to be reconstructed with public theory in line with human communicative interaction and activity:

Freedom presented itself as an end in itself, though it signified in fact liberation from oppression and tradition. Since it was necessary, upon the intellectual side, to find justification for the movements of revolt, and since established authority was upon the side of institutional life, the natural recourse was appeal to some inalienable sacred authority resident in the protesting individuals. Thus “individualism” was born, a theory which endowed singular persons in isolation from any associations, except those which they deliberately formed for their own ends, with native or natural rights. The revolt against old and limiting associations was converted, intellectually, into the doctrine of independence of any and all associations. Thus the practical movement for the limitation of the powers of government became associated, as in the influential philosophy of John Locke, with the doctrine that the ground and justification of the restriction was prior non-political rights inherent in the very structure of the individual.¹⁴

Here, we can understand Dewey’s opposition to the liberal theories exemplified by Locke’s naturalism, which assumed that a natural state was an individual state and understood man’s desires or actions as being from a naturalistic point of view. For Dewey, the concept of the natural state premised by classical liberalism meant that the individual was a human isolated from the community and excluded from the political and ethical spaces constructed through human interaction. He called this state the “naked individual,” which indicated the “sweep[ing] away [of] all associations as foreign to his nature and rights save as they proceeded from his own voluntary choice, and guaranteed his own private ends.”¹⁵

Dewey was especially critical of nineteenth-century liberalism that bowed to the classical liberal concept of naturalism. That is to say, nineteenth-century liberalism expanded the concept of nature to include the market economy, and then placed emphasis on this market-oriented concept of nature. He interpreted the nineteenth century’s laissez-faire liberalism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: A Perspective to Democratic Education and the Public Sphere
• 1 Democracy and the Public Sphere: A Critique of Liberalism and Its Politics
• 2 Creating Dialogical Communities in Schools: Education and Politics
• 3 Education, Democracy and the Public Sphere: The Transformation of Liberalism
• 4 Education for a Changing Society: Schools as Agencies of Public Action
• 5 Aesthetic Experience and the Public Sphere
• 6 Education through Art and Democracy: Dewey’s Art Education Project at the Barnes Foundation
• 7 Education for Democracy and Civil Liberties
• Epilogue: Democratic Education and the Public Sphere: Towards Dewey’s Theory of Aesthetic Experience
• References
• Index