A History of Western Philosophy of Education in the Modern Era

Andrea R. English

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350365902
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350074545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This volume traces the history of Western philosophy of education through the Modern Era. The period between 1850 and 1914 was a time of struggle for justice and opportunity, during which influential thinkers – among them, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and W.E.B. Du Bois – addressed how education is fundamentally connected to questions of what it means to be human. Readers will find a provocative collection of educational theories and concepts that point to the inherent value of the diversity of human experience and background. Each chapter illuminates how the ideas of the modern era hold promise for a meaningful re-envisioning of educational practice and policy today.

About A History of Western Philosophy of Education:

An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of education, this five-volume set that traces the development of philosophy of education through Western culture and history. Focusing on philosophers who have theorized education and its implementation, the series constitutes a fresh, dynamic, and developing view of educational philosophy. It expands our educational possibilities by reinvigorating philosophy's vibrant critical tradition, connecting old and new perspectives, and identifying the continuity of critique and reconstruction. It also includes a timeline showing major historical events, including educational initiatives and the publication of noteworthy philosophical works.

CHAPTER ONE

John Dewey’s Philosophy of Democratic Education

LEONARD J. WAKS

INTRODUCTION

More than a hundred years after its publication, John Dewey’s magisterial Democracy and Education has secured its place in the philosophy of education canon, alongside Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile. It remains among the most comprehensive statements not only of Dewey’s philosophy of education but of his entire system of ideas. The questions about democracy and education addressed in that work, however, concerned Dewey from his earliest years; Democracy and Education extends and modifies his earliest philosophical intuitions, and Dewey continued to clarify and extend these until the end of his life. An account of his philosophy of education must reach beyond Democracy and Education.

Traditional education, according to John Dewey (depicted in Figure 1.1), is undemocratic. External authorities establish aims and select subject matters, which are often foreign to learners. Traditional teaching methods restrict thinking to solving textbook problems. Learners are given few opportunities to engage voluntarily in activities that they find meaningful, and thus they have no incentive to think purposefully.

In democratic education, by contrast, teachers and learners are co-equal partners in the school community. Teachers establish settings for social activities and learners voluntarily engage, learning by doing as they act to achieve their own aims. As they meet obstacles, they reflect and communicate to seek information from peers, teachers, and others. By acting together, learners all grow, both intellectually and socially. They also expand their individual ends to include the ends of others, thus forming democratic personalities.

In this chapter, I provide an account of Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education, starting with his early theory and then accounting for his mature formulations from School and Society to Democracy and Education. For convenience, I divide my treatment into sections on the Early Works (EW) and Middle Works (MW).¹ School and Society (MW 1), the first major work on democratic education in the Middle Works, marks a sharp break from the theory in Early Works. Some additional topics and minor qualifications are introduced in the Later Works (LW), but these cannot be addressed in this chapter.

FIGURE 1.1 John Dewey at typewriter, 1946

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION IN THE EARLY WORKS

Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education in the Early Works has largely been ignored by contemporary scholars—dismissed as overly derivative from the British Idealists or passed over as merely an early indication of his mature statement in Democracy and Education (Damico 1978; Ryan 1995; a notable exception is Rogers 2011).² The early bare-bones theory is presented in a series of disconnected essays. It is remarkably clear—not obscured by the materials that flesh out Democracy and Education, such as accounts and critiques of alternative theories, detailed investigations of educational commonplaces (e.g., aims, subject matter, and method), attacks on entrenched dualisms, and arguments for placing educational theory at the center of philosophy. The early essays thus offer a spare, accessible, and distinctly Deweyan account of the relations between democracy and education that retains interest today for scholars and teachers.

My aim in this section is to provide a clear account of Dewey’s early theory of democracy and education. I have examined all essays in the five volumes of the Early Works for sustained treatments of democracy or education and have selected those explicating the central concepts. One of these central concepts is “personality.” Because this concept is unexplained in the essays on democracy and education, I searched further in the Early Works for entries providing further elaboration.

To construct my account, I have selected three important essays: “The Ethics of Democracy” (EW 1: 228–50, 1888), “Christianity and Democracy” (EW 4: 4–11, 1892), and “Ethical Principles Underlying Education” (EW 5: 56–84, 1897). I further rely on Psychology (EW 2, 1887) and “Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal” (EW 4: 43–54, 1893) to flesh out Dewey’s developing notions of “personality” and “self,” which are central to his account of democracy and education. “My Pedagogical Creed” (EW 5: 1897), the capstone work of the early theory, sums up its final state and provides a bridge to the Middle Works.

Democracy

“The Ethics of Democracy” (1888): In “The Ethics of Democracy” (EW 1: 228–50), Dewey interprets democracy as the self-organizing result when all members of society forge their own positions in the ever-changing social order under conditions of free communication. He begins his argument by critiquing atomic individualism. Individuals, he says, are only persons as they develop, under concrete social conditions, seeking their own ends and discovering their own truths. They are thus all already saturated with social narratives, norms, and values; each person is “society concentrated,” a “localized manifestation” of social life (EW 1: 237). No social contract is needed to join them together; society is already an existing fact of human life from the beginning. A people can be (self-)governed simply by living together, communicating, forming bonds of sympathy, and negotiating their respective positions in the social order (EW 1: 231–2). Dewey’s account of the state here as not a logical necessity for governance of social life but only one social institution among others foreshadows his later account in The Public and Its Problems (LW 2).

As a result of this shared sociality, says Dewey (following Governor Samuel Tilden, twenty-fifth Governor of New York and 1876 Democratic candidate for president), in a democratic polity the majority and minority are not “opposites” (EW 1: 235–6). Each is, in a different manner, society concentrated. They share a common font of traditions, which they draw on in appealing to those in the middle. The minority does not reject the results of elections and provoke civil war when it loses an election because it retains democratic faith that, based on common ideals, broad communication, and a fair process, its side has the better case and will eventually prevail. Rogers (2011) finds this insight valuable, and it supports Dewey’s view that democratic faith can ultimately be rewarded to note that “Ethics of Democracy” preceded the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, granting women the right to vote, by thirty years, and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, desegregating American schools, by seventy.³

Democracy, Dewey insists, anticipating the famous words to this effect in Democracy and Education, is more than a form of government. To call democracy constitutional government, he says, is like calling a home an arrangement of bricks (or to consider a different example, calling marriage an exchange of vows). The reality of democracy, for individuals who are each society concentrated, is collective memory, consciousness of the present, and future ideals animating social action (EW 1: 241). Democracy is a spirit working through and vitalizing social relations.

Democracy is thus primarily an ethical and spiritual ideal. The alternative Platonic social ideal—the rule of the best and wisest—is divorced from reality; “wise men” cannot simply insert people into social positions that are suitable and good for them: “the practical consequence of giving the few wise and good power is that they cease to remain wise and good. They become ignorant of the needs and requirement [sic] of the many” (EW 1: 242). Each person, Dewey insists, must determine their unique place in society and take personal initiative in securing it.

Freedom is not, on this view, unrestricted will but, says Dewey, conformity to law—the law (in Kant’s formulation) that every personality is an absolute end. Democracy requires freedom because all personalities must be free to forge their own place in the social order through personal initiative or there is no democracy (EW 1: 243–4)—a point affirmed in post–Civil War amendments to the US Constitution that Dewey forcefully reiterates in the Ethics of 1908. Equality is not predominantly a matter of economic distribution; it lies in personality—the equal demand for dignity and respect (EW 1: 245). Democracy, Dewey concludes, is thus the ultimate ethical ideal, where the distinction between the spiritual and secular has ceased. As in the Christian Kingdom of God, so in democracy the divine and human organization of society are one (EW 1: 249).

“Christianity and Democracy” (1892): Even the casual reader will note Dewey’s last-minute transition from ethics to spiritual religion. Nothing in “The Ethics of Democracy” itself justifies this move, but its basis lies elsewhere in the Early Works. For now, I note that Dewey builds on this idea in “Christianity and Democracy.” Christianity is there interpreted as revelation of truth—“truth of the word”—in a form accessible to civilized humanity (EW 4: 6):

Revelation must reveal. It is not simply a question of the reality declared, it is also a question of comprehension by him to whom the reality is declared. … A religion of revelation must uncover and discover; it must bring home its truth to the consciousness of the individual. Revelation undertakes, in a word, not only to state that the truth of things is such and such, it undertakes to give the individual organs for the truth, organs by which he can get hold of, can see and feel, the truth. (EW 4: 6)

If Jesus had an explicit truth, Dewey says, we could not have grasped it for ourselves until we lived it (EW 4: 7). Dewey here appears to be claiming that the shift from divine commands to parables and metaphor-laden miracles forces civilized audiences to think their meanings through and to test them for themselves. Our actions and their consequences, Dewey says, drawing already on pragmatist conceptions of meaning and truth, are our only means for appropriating truth, and we cannot act except with others and within social contexts.

The connection between Christianity and democracy is that democracy is also “revelation,” requiring thinking and thus connecting with our fellows. Democracy thus implies freedom of social action, giving truth the chance to show itself. Personal and cultural truths can only be expressed in social action under conditions of freedom and recognition of those from all groups. The work of history, Dewey says, has been to free truth by tearing down the walls of isolation and class division that prevent free expression and communication (EW 4: 8). In these passages we find the seed of the theory of democracy that flowers in Democracy and Education. Truth can only be revealed when it moves through individuals and becomes a public affair. Ideal democracy is the culmination of freedom in history in that it indicates the elimination of all barriers that prevent the full movement of truth throughout social life. The spiritual unification of humanity in the Kingdom of God is thus but a “further expression” of this freedom of truth, demonstrating the equivalence of the ethical and religious formulations (EW 4: 8–9). This spiritual ideal of self-governance of humanity through free communication and cooperation shows affinities between Dewey’s early philosophy and the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy, a writer who inspired Jane Addams and whose philosophical works Dewey greatly admired (LW 17: 381–93).

Psychology (1887): The conceptual connections between personality, truth, and the Kingdom of God are made fully explicit in the Psychology of 1887. Initial awareness of personal existence, Dewey states therein, is through bodily sensations, which are then extended to, for example, the food in our mouth, the spoon, and the nurse who feeds us (EW 2: 242). As social feeling develops, we “merge our private life in … community, transcend our immediate self, and realize our being in its widest way” (EW 2: 245). This merger with others entails our taking the good, and the ends, into our own personal conception of the good.

In so doing, we build democratic ethical character and eventually our innate capacities find their final expression in our unification with God. Through knowledge we “take the universe of objects into ourselves” (EW 2: 245). In aesthetic perception and creation we “take the universe of ideal worths into ourselves”; in social life, we take in personal relations and the moral law (EW 2: 245). Finally, a “completely realized personality” unites in itself truth (the unity of the relations of all objects), beauty (the unity of all ideal values), and morality (the unity of humanity). “The self is realized, and finds its true life in God” (EW 2: 245). Democracy is here conceived as a self-organizing process in which all persons, through action and communication, develop fully the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of themselves and eventually find themselves realized in God. Democracy is then truly “The Kingdom of God” where human and spiritual realms are united.

“Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal” (1893): The idea of a “completely realized personality” suggests that personal development comes to an end. Dewey insists, however, that social life keeps changing, demanding new knowledge, valuations, and social relationships. This conundrum forces him to reexamine the idea of self-realization and, ultimately, in “Self-Realization as Ethical Ideal” (EW 4), to reject the idea of complete and final realization; selves, he now asserts, are realized in, and only in, present acts in which our energies are concentrated and undivided. There is no end to this process as every new situation calls for concentrated action. This account of the realized self appears to have impelled him to shift from “personality” in the Early...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Series Introduction
• General Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Volume Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction: Struggle, Resistance, and Opportunity—A Historical and Philosophical Lens on Education in the Modern Era
• 1 John Dewey’s Philosophy of Democratic Education
• 2 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Education
• 3 Ethical Relationality in Education: Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Nel Noddings
• 4 Psychoanalysis with Education
• 5 The Philosophical Milieu in Nineteenth-Century American Education: From Idealism to Pragmatism
• 6 Philosophy of Education and Early Childhood: Invitations and Provocations of Childhood from Maria Montessori and Reggio Emilia
• 7 Philosophies of Race, Justice, and Education: Traditions of Embodied Knowledge
• 8 Critical Theory and Education
• 9 Education and the Linguistic Turn
• Contributors
• Index
• Imprint