Before I begin, I’m going to ask a favor. Let us assume for the sake of argument that commentator Thomas Brewton will continue to refer to Dewey from time to time, that Google News will pick up these references, and that the Dewey that Brewton refers to will bear only the slightest resemblance to the actual Dewey. Brewton has mentioned that he wants to metaphorically “put a stake through [Dewey’s] heart and inter him forever,” so I just don’t think he’s going to quit any time soon. But it’s kind of a one-note song. For example, in a recent column, Brewton argues that “a big part of Dewey’s progressive education was his view that history is a “dead” subject that deserves no place in the school curriculum. Students were to learn whatever they need to learn through “experiences” of communal life in class projects.” Beyond the fact that the class projects were supplemented by more traditional classroom work, the class projects themselves were historically based. Students recreated various periods of human history in order to understand the historical roots of our traditions and practices. (This is to say nothing of the role of history in pragmatism as a philosophical system, since Dewey was often concerned with the historical development of an idea.)
More interesting is this blog post from a writer in Hong Kong. Fai Mao is clearly a religious individual who has cause to disagree with the generally secular turn of Dewey’s philosophy. But he takes the view that there is much in Dewey’s educational theory worth drawing on, even for religious teachers. I think this is really a key passage:
C.S. Lewis wrote in his book Letters to Malcolm that the best devotions are those “?that you do while reading a pagan philosopher with a pen in your hand and a pipe in your teeth” ? Well I don’t smoke but I understand the sentiment. Some of my best and deepest devotional thoughts over the past three or four years have come reading Kierkegaard the existentialist, Heiddeger the NAZI, Bergson, Popper and Husserl who were Jewish, and John Dewey who was a lapsed Protestant.
Head on over to Fai Mao’s blog to see which elements of Dewey he finds valuable. For me, the most impressive thing is the willigness to search for the value in the first place.