John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism

Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert, Kersten Reich, Larry A. Hickman

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823230204
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Pragmatisme en philosophie

Many contemporary constructivists are particularly attuned to Dewey's penetrating criticism of traditional epistemology, which offers rich alternatives for understanding processes of learning and education, knowledge and truth, and experience and culture. This book, the result of cooperation between the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and the Dewey Center at the University of Cologne, provides an excellent example of the international character of pragmatist studies against the backdrop of constructivist concerns. As a part of their exploration of the many points of contact between classical pragmatism and contemporary constructivism, its contributors turn their attention to theories of interaction and transaction, communication and culture, learning and education, community and democracy, theory and practice, and inquiry and methods.Part One is a basic survey of Dewey's pragmatism and its implications for contemporary constructivism. Part Two examines the implications of the connections between Deweyan pragmatism and contemporary constructivism. Part Three presents a lively exchange among the contributors, as they challenge one another and defend their positions and perspectives. As they seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points in ways that are designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. This concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism.

PART ONE

DEWEY BETWEEN PRAGMATISM
AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

ONE

JOHN DEWEY: HIS LIFE AND WORK
Larry A. Hickman

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In 1929 John Dewey declared in a newsreel clip:

I am not here to knock going to college. If a young person has the opportunity to do so and has the character and intelligence to take advantage of it, it is a good thing. But going to college is not the same thing as getting an education, although the two are often confused. A boy or a girl can go to college and get a degree and not much more. On the other hand, a boy or a girl in a factory, shop or store can get an education without a degree, if they have the ambition. They have to work hard, want to learn, be observing (keep their ears and eyes open), talk to those wiser than themselves and set aside some time every day for reading. They have to struggle harder than those that go to college. But the struggle, if they make the effort, will give them power. They get their education from contact with the realities of life and not just from books.

With some minor editorial changes, this chapter is the script of the video “John Dewey: His Life and Work,” written and narrated by Larry A. Hickman (Davidson Films 2001). It can be ordered through Davidson Films Inc., 668 March Street, San Luis Obispo CA 93401. For further information see http://www.davidsonfilms.com.

Dewey was already seventy when this newsreel footage, in which he distinguished education from mere schooling, was shot. It was rather a surprising position for a famous professor to take in the mass media of the day. After all, he was in his forty-fifth year of university teaching and had already written more than a dozen books. He would live another twenty-two years and publish eleven more books. What this little newsreel clip reveals is Dewey’s remarkable ability to envision possibilities beyond his own experience, his faith in the intelligence of average citizens, and his openness to the use of new technologies.¹ These qualities were to be profoundly important in his scholarly writings and his involvement in human affairs.

During his long and productive life, Dewey wrote widely about psychology, philosophy, art, and social issues. To give you an introduction to this wealth of material, I will focus on three general topics that are recurring themes in his work. These do not cover all of the many subjects that Dewey discussed, but I hope they will inspire you to delve more deeply into his work. The themes I am pursuing are: (1) his concept of the purpose and process of human learning; (2) his understanding of truth as a process, instead of something absolute and unchanging; and (3) his faith in democracy as the only means of social organization that can foster individual fulfillment, and its implications for education and the arts.

Like all of us, Dewey was profoundly influenced by the historical and technical changes of his times. In the course of his ninety-two years he witnessed dramatic changes in almost every aspect of human life. When he was born, on October 20, 1859, Abraham Lincoln had not yet been elected president. The Civil War was only a storm cloud on the horizon. He died during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower after two horrific world wars, one ended by an atomic bomb. At the time of Dewey’s birth, most Americans were dependent on wind, water, and wood technologies. During that year, 1859, America drilled its first oil well, which led to technologies on which we all now depend. Also during 1859, Charles Darwin’s culture-shattering work The Origin of Species was published. This book was to have a major influence on Dewey’s thought.

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, the third of four sons of Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich Dewey. During the Civil War his father, a grocer by trade, served in the First Vermont Cavalry as a quartermaster. It is almost certain that the young John Dewey witnessed the devastation of that war when the family joined Archibald at his post in northern Virginia in 1864. In 1867, the family returned together to Burlington. The Burlington of Dewey’s youth was a center of immigration and industrialization. The ethnic, class, and religious diversity young Dewey experienced there may have helped prepare him for the diverse cultures he would seek out during the rest of his life, both in urban America and abroad.

Dewey studied philosophy at the University of Vermont, graduating in 1879. He continued his study of philosophy during the next few years, even while he was employed as a high school teacher in the boom town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. In 1882, he entered the new doctoral program at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied logic, new experimental psychology, and neo-Hegelian philosophy. After completing his doctorate two years later, he accepted a teaching position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

During Dewey’s decade in Michigan, his personal life changed dramatically. He met and fell in love with an intelligent, socially progressive student named Harriet Alice Chipman. The two were married in 1886 and would eventually have seven children. Alice Dewey’s involvement in progressive causes such as securing the vote for women and defending the rights of ethnic minorities had a great influence on John Dewey’s growing awareness of social injustice.

The course of Dewey’s intellectual life also underwent major changes during his years in Ann Arbor. He began to reject most of the claims of traditional metaphysics and to develop a Pragmatic notion of truth. During this period Dewey was greatly influenced by William James’s Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. James thought of habits as active forces in human life, and he treated belief as a kind of habit. In his view, beliefs, as well as other types of habits, are really rules for action. They are identifiable in terms of the results they produce. James’s new “dynamic” psychology was exactly what Dewey had been looking for to advance his own theories about how we learn.

In 1894 the recently founded University of Chicago appointed Dewey as head of its department of philosophy, which included psychology and pedagogy, or what we now call education. Dewey would excel in all three disciplines. By 1905, at the age of forty-six, he had served as president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association, and he was one of America’s best-known educators.

Dewey’s association in Chicago with social reformer Jane Addams and his involvement with Hull House, where she administered community services, provided him with firsthand knowledge of the poverty and despair of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were attempting to make their living in Chicago during the 1890s.² Although the Deweys were only in Chicago for ten years, those were crucial years for their lives and work. Both Deweys were thoroughly involved in the education of their own children and close observers of their learning processes. These experiences, and John’s experiments in psychology, led him in 1896 to found an elementary school that would serve as a laboratory for the university’s new Department of Education.

Analysis of Human Learning

Earlier I said that Darwin’s Origin of Species had been a major influence on Dewey’s thought. Dewey took one of Darwin’s central concepts and applied it to the fields of psychology and philosophy. This was the idea that species are not fixed, but constantly undergoing change.³ (We will return to this idea in a moment, when we discuss Dewey’s notion of truth.) Dewey combined this idea of the tendency of organisms to adapt with the observation that the existence of living organisms is rhythmic, alternating between phases of imbalance and equilibrium. In 1896 Dewey worked out some of the consequences of these ideas in an article entitled “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (EW 5:96–109). This watershed essay was to have a major impact on the fields of philosophy, psychology, and education, and even now, more than one hundred years later, it is still the subject of extensive interest and discussion.

The basic idea of the reflex arc went back at least as far as René Descartes in the seventeenth century. Descartes had developed a mechanical model, according to which an external impulse, say from a burned foot, activates a kind of cord or cable attached to the brain. The brain then activates another cable attached to the foot, thus completing the reflex arc. In his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, William James sought to improve this traditional reflex arc model, which he thought was too mechanical. First, James replaced Descartes’ image of a man next to a fire with the more modern image of a child reaching for a candle. According to the old mechanical model that James was seeking to improve, a child sees a candle: that is the stimulus. She reaches for the flame: that is the response. The flame burns the child’s finger: that’s another stimulus. And the child withdraws her hand: that’s another response. In both sequences of the child’s behavior, the seeing / reaching and the feeling-the-burn / withdrawing-the-hand, there was said to be an arc from the external stimulation of the sense organs to a response set up by the internal working of the child’s brain.

James attempted to improve this model by emphasizing the associations produced in the child’s mind and the new habit they produced. In this case, the new habit was the child’s withdrawing her hand in the presence of a flame. James replaced the mechanical stimulus-response model of Descartes with an organic model, according to which new associations are formed. These associations were said to be in the mind.

But Dewey was still not convinced. He thought the reflex arc model was fatally flawed because it amounted, as he put it, to “a series of jerks” (EW 5:99) that were unable to account for the rich coordination of situations and processes that make up even the simplest of human learning experiences. His own analysis of this learning experience begins, not with a stimulus that is external to the organism, but with a stimulus that is a coordinated act involving the sensory and motor actions of the child and the context in which the situation occurs. The context includes such things as the child’s past experiences, the environment in which the event takes place, and her level of engagement, or how involved she is in the experience. All of these factors shape the episode and the learning that takes place, or doesn’t, as a result of it.

For Dewey, as it would be later for Jean Piaget, learning is not a series of truncated arcs, but a circuit of imbalance and restored equilibrium. The learner is not an inactive recipient of experience but an active player within it, bringing with her a set of behaviors and expectations from past events. Dewey’s analysis, as he later elaborated in his five-step analysis of effective learning, would go like this:

1. Emotional response: A child in a state of equilibrium, say playing with a familiar toy, comes upon something unexpected. Her equilibrium is disturbed. The situation is now unstable and this instability triggers an emotional response.

2. Definition of problem: The child attempts to make the situation more stable by applying lessons learned from past experiences—the new situation calls for exploration, just as previous ones have. This phase of learning involves an intellectual response.

3. Formation of hypothesis: Now that the problem has been defined as something that requires exploration, the child uses a familiar method—she reaches for the candle.

4. Testing / experimenting: Her reach for the candle is a test of the proposed solution. In the past, she has grasped objects in order to become better acquainted with them. But now, her attempt to apply this familiar solution results in a burned finger.

5. Application: If the burn sensation is sufficient to prevent further exploration, the child has completed the circuit of learning. She now knows about the effect of flame on fingers, and has thus added a new circle of adjustment to her understanding of the world. The problematic situation has been resolved. As an organism, she is once again in a state of equilibrium.

If the burn is not sufficient to prevent further exploration, the experiment starts all over again until the lesson is learned and equilibrium is restored.

Dewey’s analysis of the classic situation of the candle and child illuminates several points critical to an understanding of his work: Dewey insists that learning always begins in the middle of things. The learner is not a blank slate upon which ideas are to be written. Nor is her mind a file cabinet, into which facts are to be filed away. Each learner is a living organism with her own history, needs, desires, and, perhaps most importantly, her own interests. As we saw in the news-reel clip, Dewey thought that learning takes place outside, as well as inside, the school room.

It is in the context of the University of Chicago Elementary School that Dewey’s ideas about learning received their most rigorous tests. This school, also known as the “Laboratory School,” was opened in l896, the same year that Dewey published his “Reflex Arc” article. From 1901 until 1904, Alice would serve as its principal. The Laboratory School was a laboratory in fact as well as in name. Dewey never intended it to be a model that other schools should follow, nor would he feel that there ever would be a school that would be the perfect model. In his view, education always reflects the circumstances of the times and students involved and should evolve as these elements change.

Dewey’s educational ideas were, in part, a rejection of the rote, curriculum-driven approach to learning that was the standard methodology of his day. But he also rejected the opposite concept, the exaggerated “child-centered” approach that uncritically follows the impulses and uninformed interests of the child. Unfortunately, Dewey’s term “progressive education” has too frequently been used as a disparaging phrase to describe such educational practices—practices that involve what Dewey rejected as “plan-less improvisation.”

In Dewey’s view, the challenge of education should be to integrate the educational subject matter with the talents and interests of the learner. As we will see, Dewey often overcame either / or dichotomies by looking beyond the conflicts they represented. At the Lab School, children learned traditional academic subjects such as arithmetic, reading, and science, but they were also taught skills such as weaving, carpentry, cooking, and gardening. These practical skills were presented as examples of problem-solving. But they were also taught as embodiments of more abstract forms of knowledge, and as providing important tools for further discoveries.

If education is adjustment within an environment, as Dewey thought,⁴ then it is the whole person that adjusts, and not just the function or aspect of the organism we call the intellect. Deborah Meier, principal of the Mission Hill School in Boston, who has been a force for widening the scope of traditional education, comments on the relevance of Dewey’s ideas for educational practice:

Once we recognize that academia is but one form of intellectual life, we can begin to imagine other possibilities. Other possibilities don’t mean that all traditional disciplines are unimportant to us; quite the opposite, they force us to ask how such disciplines are relevant to our inquiries. What determines what we study, the driving criteria, should be the demands of a democratic citizenry, not the requirements of academia.

Our school, Mission Hill, a public school in Boston, serves 164 students between the ages of five and fourteen. Dewey’s five-step analysis of the process of inquiry applies to how our students go about their learning.

1. Emotional response: For instance, a sixth–seventh grade class is studying support and structure as a part of physical science. The entire school has been studying ancient Greece and these children were intrigued that slim pillars held up enormous loads. This curiosity about the nature of material strength and function led to further explorations.

2. Definition of problem: Their teacher challenged them to build a structure eleven inches high that would hold a heavy load using only 100 index cards. The children had to realize the task involved modifying their materials. An important task of education, I feel, is to expand the ways one can look at a situation. What are the elements of a problem that are important and which are extraneous?

3. Formation of hypothesis: They then applied their previous knowledge of the strength of columns and formulated plans to build their structures. Their ability to make a useful hypothesis evolved from their knowledge base and experience of how columns work.

4. Testing / experimenting: These students then subjected their hypothesis to testing, in this case with quite dramatic results. In other situations, the testing involves collecting data or with imaginary “dramatic rehearsals,” to use Dewey’s terminology for “what if” thinking.

5. Application: The final application of knowledge sometimes comes immediately, in other situations later. Our students aren’t all going to become structural engineers, but we feel this kind of problem solving prepares them for reasoned inquiry in other situations and preparation for the more theoretical physics they will encounter a few years later in high school. Learning to apply the methodology of reasoned inquiry to scientific, social and artistic situations has been the great legacy of civilization and one that is basic to a democracy.

Of course Dewey’s five-step description of how we go about solving problems and learning is not meant to be a kind of cookie cutter, stamping out uniform experiences. Each episode of learning is unique. As Deborah Meier reminded us, every sequence of learning begins and ends with an emotional response. The very first step in inquiry is felt need, and the very last step is a feeling of satisfaction or completion. Between these steps we do intellectual work such as defining problems and forming and testing hypotheses. Taken as a whole, this organic rhythm of doubt, followed by struggle and then recovery of equilibrium, is precisely what Dewey offered more than a century ago as an alternative to the reflex model of learning. Despite Dewey’s enormous influence, however, some well-known educational theorists still accept the basic premise of the reflex arc model. These people think of learning as a mechanical process, measurable by standardized tests, that has very little to do with the emotional life of the learner.

The Nature of Truth

This brings us to Dewey’s view of the nature of truth. Some philosophers, whom we might call absolutists, have argued that there are statements forever absolute and unchanging. Moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments; physical laws, such as the speed of light; and mathematical equations, such as “10 divided by 3 = 3⅓ …” are often cited as examples of such certainties. Other philosophers, often termed relativists, have argued that there is no such thing as objective truth. Whatever works for a particular culture or individual is true for that culture or individual. If it feels good, do it.

Typically, Dewey found something of value in both of these extreme views, even though he rejected their central...