Dewey's Social Philosophy

Democracy as Education

J. Shook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137467348
• eBook ISBN: 9781137454782
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Dewey is known for education theories to promote democracy, but what is democracy for? His philosophy advanced democracy as education itself, reaching higher levels of social intelligence. Praising community or promoting rights doesn't get to the heart of Dewey's vision, which seeks everyone's good in a social life that is intelligently lived.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT ARE DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION FOR?

JOHN DEWEY’S INTEGRATION OF EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY ENCOMPASSES, immediately or remotely, not just his social and political principles, but also his commitments across psychology, epistemology, ontology, axiology, ethics, and legal theory. Fully comprehending Dewey’s educational theory, including how he defends it and how he would put it into practice, is to fairly understand his entire philosophy. He did assert that “Philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted enterprise.”¹

Dewey is known for his education theories promoting democracy, but what is democracy for? His philosophy advanced democracy as education itself, to reach ever-higher levels of social intelligence. Praising the community and promoting rights are Deweyan priorities, yet they depend on the core of Dewey’s visionary philosophy, which seeks everyone’s good in a social life that is intelligently lived.

This book explains Dewey’s political vision for democracy as a form of deliberative polyarchy based on ethical principles. This kind of democracy amounts to a communal exercise in experimental civic education. This ethical project, successfully pervading all of democratic society and leaving no nondemocratic elements untouched, must be revolutionarily comprehensive. Maintaining the civil peace, a productive economy, a participatory citizenry, an effective penal system, and a religiously harmonious society are top democratic priorities. The economy needs employees and entrepreneurs who are broadly educated, not merely well trained; education is so crucial for empowerment that it must be a citizenship guarantee; education should be prioritized in law and criminal justice; and education is crucial for ethical communities embracing religious pluralism.

Dewey’s core views on humanity’s capacities for learning, socializing, problem solving, social intelligence, self-ruling, and flourishing forge a whole far greater than the sum of the parts. For Dewey, a society capable of self-rule is a community of self-creators, responsible for developing their own creative capacities. There is nothing about society beyond the experimental reach of citizens in a genuine democracy. His progressive revolution is yet to be realized, but his philosophy remains just as insightful and relevant as ever.

EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY

Dewey’s philosophy has been largely obscured by the educational movement he helped to inspire. Progressive education, by the 1950s and 1960s, came to embody many ideas and values impossible to locate in Dewey’s educational writings or elsewhere in his large body of work. Nevertheless, progressive education’s advocates and critics alike have tried to perceive those later themes while looking back to Dewey, inspiring a flood of distortions and fabrications about Dewey’s thought. There is no need to review that mass of literature here. Querying the culture wars over education closer to our own times cannot be enlightening about the theories Dewey proposed in his time. As cultural exhaustion seems to be approaching, Dewey’s robust reforms are still more advanced than anything offered by today’s ideological contestants.

Another commonplace query is about education for democracy. Presuming that we know well enough what democracy is, and where it should be going, leaves us asking how well educational institutions are working to further those aims. This simplified situation lets us ponder how well the means of education fit given ends of democracy. Means–ends practicalities are complex enough, but at least this task can be stated clearly. Where education isn’t serving democratic aims, some redesign is in order. Isn’t that pragmatic enough?

Pragmatism doesn’t regard means–ends thinking as the best we can do. Education for democracy is not the best place to begin. Investigators with divergent agendas for democracy happily start from that point and go on to use education as a battleground to advance their different expectations for citizenship.² Dewey distanced himself far from that starting point.

First of all, Dewey did not think that educational methods or educational institutions should be democratic, in most ordinary senses of the term “democratic.” Second, as Dewey argued, education isn’t really “for” anything taken to be external to itself, including democracy. Third, Dewey recommended educational methods that aren’t simply memorizations, rehearsals, or preparations for something else to happen in the future, not excepting democratic citizenship. Fourth, advancing social intelligence, which is the methodical point to education according to Dewey, cannot arbitrarily stop at the boundaries of any social institution, including government, so education and democracy cannot be two separate matters. Fifth, asking how education could advance democracy is like asking how fine cuisine could prevent hunger. Specialized cooking methods can serve specific dietary needs if much is already known about those needs and how to meet them. Similarly, the nature of democracy and under what conditions it functions properly must be the subject of thorough investigation before any inquiry into promoting democracy could be undertaken. Sixth, because divergent views of the nature and proper functioning of democracy abound, inquiries into education’s role “for” democracy in some generic sense couldn’t be useful. The splintering of educational philosophies, one for each political philosophy, at least respects a need for internal consistency but not the need for society-wide democratic education. Seventh, democratic education is left to be a ghost wandering the surface of the earth, restless and homeless, while everyone busily worships the empty alter of platitudes about education healing and unifying society.

As Dewey repeatedly warned, it would be unintelligent to define democracy and its aims as one exercise and leave the definition and design of education to some other department of thought. It surely would be a mistake to first work out an educational theory and only later ask how well it can function for democratic aims. Only by adequately understanding the democratic community could we responsibly pursue an educational philosophy for that community.

In the preface of his central text, Democracy and Education (1916), he states how democracy and education won’t be treated as distinct topics and also why democracy comes first.

The following pages embody an effort to detect and state the ideas implied in a democratic society and to apply these ideas to the problems of the enterprise of education. The discussion includes an indication of the constructive aims and methods of public education as seen from this point of view, and a critical estimate of the theories of knowing and moral development which were formulated in earlier social conditions, but which still operate, in societies nominally democratic, to hamper the adequate realization of the democratic ideal.³

Democracy and Education, which Dewey later described as the one book containing the principles of his entire philosophy until a burst of books during the 1930s, was published while he was at the peak of his career and influence across education, the social sciences, and the next generation of philosophical pragmatists.⁴ It was also composed during the crisis of a world war and a period of mounting worry about democracy’s ability to withstand the strains of the modern age. Dewey was just as worried about immature forms of democracy at home as he was about foreign menaces abroad. Readers must recall that in the year his book was published, there were only five democracies on the planet. (Only New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Denmark permitted all adults to vote.) Evidently democracy had a long way to go, and Dewey realized this as well as anyone.

Democracy itself must be fully understood in the course of asking how education can help develop democratic citizens. If unrelated definitions of democracy and education are brought together for comparison, there could be little surprise at their failure to automatically cohere. Yet time and again, political theorists, pundits, and prognosticators are shocked (shocked!) to find out that hopeful educational reforms have been ineffective at advancing democratic aims laid down long ago when “democracy” was ill-defined and ill-fitted for promoting social intelligence. Even admirers of Dewey and progressive education struggle to connect the core purpose of education with the essence of democracy; there seem to be too many cores and essences, and possible combinations abound.⁵

Progressives of all eras face the puzzles inherent to education within democracy. Dewey was hardly the only psychologytrained thinker, among many interdisciplinary reformers, offering educational recommendations during the Progressive era. Some were helping to make education more bureaucratic and managerial, while others were selling intelligence measures and designing standardized tests. As science-based as Dewey’s philosophy was, professional psychologists claimed education as a scientific field that was not to be confused with irrelevant philosophical issues. The specific reforms that Dewey urged, especially about the professionalization of expert teachers and experimental learning centers, were never mainstream, popular, or well funded. Dewey was the most famous, but not the most influential. As one education historian has observed,

[O]ne cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.⁶

As much as Thorndike represents the isolation of psychology’s research into education away from broader social contexts, Dewey represents the integration of all educational practices with the surrounding civic life of society.

In Dewey’s view, if democracy has any chance of being progressive, which it should by its nature, then its education must be progressive in lockstep. In 1938, reflecting on 30 years of controversy over progressivism and educational reform,⁷ Dewey was already trying to correct misconceptions:

If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the new education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles amid the variety of progressive schools now existing. To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world.⁸

Individuality, freedoms, new experiences, relevant needs, changing times—these are all matters easily associated with the democratic way of life. Education needn’t be preparation for democracy but democracy itself, in a suitably managed form. Furthermore, if education can be democratic, couldn’t democracy itself be educational?

It is still time, as it was in Dewey’s day, to demand a democracy worthy of education.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

How can a democracy for education be found? If we examine the nature and function of education, we will find dynamic learning, liberating empowerment, and community-oriented concerns. The values of education are values of democracy.

Let us set out one of Dewey’s statements on the nature of democracy, to guide us as we look closer at educational goals and values.

From the ethical point of view, therefore, it is not too much to say that the democratic ideal poses, rather than solves, the great problem: How to harmonize the development of each individual with the maintenance of a social state in which the activities of one will contribute to the good of all the others. It expresses a postulate in the sense of a demand to be realized: That each individual shall have the opportunity for release, expression, fulfillment, of his distinctive capacities, and that the outcome shall further the establishment of a fund of shared values. Like every true ideal, it signifies something to be done rather than something already given, something ready-made. Because it is something to be accomplished by human planning and arrangement, it involves constant meeting and solving of problems—that is to say, the desired harmony never is brought about in a way which meets and forestalls all future developments.⁹

If the people themselves are responsible for undertaking the great task of self-rule, then they must be society’s planners and arrangers. Arranging and rearranging society so that no one’s capacities are allowed to stagnate or permitted to dominate others is a creative task of immense difficulty. No wonder escapist dreamers wish for a wisdom surpassing all humanity to take charge. It is the case that unless the people as a whole manage to do it, arranging society will be done by a few managers eager to rule so that they can arrange society for their own good. The people seeking the good for all society couldn’t do much more evil than tyrants, and probably less evil. Education is what makes the difference for a society accomplishing more good than harm. It is what has made the greatest difference throughout human history.

Education involves learning, the acquisition of useful habits through experience. That encompasses the development of innumerable intelligent capacities and reasoning skills. If “intelligence” denotes an actual generic capacity, then education would be vitally concerned with enhancing it. Many sorts of content- and context-related intelligences can be empirically detected and measured in human conduct. Any common core would involve a process-dependent set of cognitive functions—functions unable by themselves to suffice for intelligence but when put together could contribute to higher intellectual processes that permit intelligence.

[N]early all of human behavior involves cognitive abilities as these encompass processes that include attention, perception, comprehension, judgment, decision making, reasoning, intuition, and memory, among others.¹⁰

Reasoning itself is a complex process, capable of multiple forms due to reliance on one set or another of lower-level cognitive abilities. Anticipating consequences arising from given initial conditions is one sort of inferential process; figuring out which conditions gave rise to given effects is another; and inferring a thing’s properties and uses from some of its visible traits is still another. Reasoning’s advanced forms, such as logic and mathematics, are trainable human capacities, and intricate combinations of strict inference patterns with carefully collected observations yield scientific methodologies.

Although there is no singular mental thing or process pertaining to the term “intelligence,” human activities are conducted with greater or lesser intelligence, and education must rely on that feature of intelligence and enhance it when possible. Intelligence can harness most of the brain’s functions, at some point or another, so there won’t be any specific brain function that reliably permits intelligence by itself. Nevertheless, if one cognitive ability has received the most credit for the power of human intelligence, that ability must be reasoning. Without the ability to form and apply ideas about if–then relationships connecting what is already familiar with other anticipated matters, our other cognitive strengths wouldn’t amount to much. Unless the nature and functioning of reasoning is appreciated, little about intelligence could be comprehensible, guiding any learning opportunities would be a haphazard venture, and education would be a realm of speculation and dogmatism.

Pragmatism, the first philosophy to be well informed by behavioral and brain sciences, regards human intelligence as fundamentally about ends–context–means relationships as they dynamically develop over time. The practicalism of reasonable “means–ends” inference is acceptable enough for short-term progress toward unquestioned goals. Daily life is replete with moment-by-moment judgments of that sort. Yet we can also ponder new opportunities and potential ends and reason out ways to attain them. People can prospectively envision (potentially) achievable goals within (modestly) adjustable contexts in light of (accessible) means shaped for such an achievement. Each factor—goal, context, means—is considered in light of the others during a display of reasonableness, and they receive the closest attention when high intelligence is displayed. We evolved to have reasoning among our cognitive abilities, and we can embody a high degree of intelligence. The achievements of human culture are their fruits.

Pragmatism expects good reasoning to hypothesize how valuable goals, an opportune context, and flexible means can be mutually adjusted to each other, in light of temporal and resource restraints. Often, reliable habits need little adjustment as they deliver desired goods, but high intelligence takes habits to be means, means that can be altered and improved to function better in unusual or difficult situations. What we take to be conscious forethought in our awareness is precisely this intense cognitive activity of dynamic readjustment of habitual means to dubious contexts.¹¹ What needs to be learned about this odd situation so that some adjusted habits can still yield realistic goals pretty quickly? In such “problematic” situations, nothing goes unaltered: the context is inquired into and modified; bodily and material means are reshaped and redirected; and plans are changed to reach revised goals. The hard work of reasoning and deliberation is precisely that dynamic mutual re-adjustment of three alterable factors into better coordination together. Dewey’s later books, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922) and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), elaborate this pragmatist examination into problem-solving and deliberation.

The consistent ability to consciously attend to forging successful coordination is what we also call acting conscientiously. Being merely conscious and being conscientious are mental capacities located on the same range of awareness, occupying each end of that spectrum. Education is an ethical matter just because it vitally concerns the future welfare and success of children’s lives. Education is also ethical in another sense due to its development of a person’s conscientious attention to social consequences. Furthermore, education is ethical in a third sense: education can vitally enhance social cooperation overall in a society. Education is intelligence put in service of society, and when education is well designed, it is the engine of social intelligence for the benefit of all society.

Our human capacity for social intelligence and conscientious conduct cannot be denied. Primate biology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and social neuroscience have together established beyond doubt that the distinctive prefrontal cortex of the human brain evolved primarily to permit intense co-dependent and cooperative sociality within groups. Humans prospectively envision group projects for group benefit, and the environing context of greatest relevance for intelligence becomes the social context of partnering cooperators. High social intelligence tries to coordinate available human resources, taking into consideration the skills of each participant. This social intelligence even includes co-optive and punitive strategies for groups to deal with the free-riders, betrayers, and rule-breakers among them.¹²

Because the abilities of participants are taken by high social intelligence to be a matter for adjustment, we spend a great deal of time and effort to improve each other’s skills. Gossiping about each other’s lives, foibles, and reputations seems to take up a large portion of our communications, but after those engrossing topics, discussing each other’s abilities and refining them is another topic of much interest. We know how we can be good at education, and we understand education’s crucial value for maintaining communities.

Education, most generally, is a broad label for methods to inculcate skills through direct engagements of guidance between instructor and learner. Education requires a social relationship, and a social relationship implies understood responsibilities accepted by both parties directed to some joint goal. Haphazard emulation, accidental learning, and rudimentary training do not rise to the level of social education. There is no question that the primate brain is also very good with those building blocks for education which developed later on during the rise of human culture. Education is social intelligence applied to a situation calling for intentional and efficient learning, aiming at the acquisition of capacities permitting more effective social participation. Essentially, education is precisely what social intelligence does to perpetuate and enhance itself, instead of neglecting intelligence as som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. What are Democracy and Education for?
• 2. Pragmatism, Learning, and Democracy
• 3. The Ethical Justification for Democracy
• 4. Equal Opportunity, Education, and Democracy
• 5. Moral Education, Justice, and Punishment
• 6. Democracy, Religion, and Ethical Progress
• Notes
• Index