Dewey Watch: Manners and Education
When I was looking for the Dewey misquote that formed the launching pad for the “Think for Themselves� post, one of the places I found the quote was an article by Amber Pawlik advocating home schooling. The author offers a number of quotes from Dewey’s writings – and unlike the “think for themselves� line, the other passages are actually cited. What is lacking is any sense of context.
For example, Pawlik calls Dewey the “father of progressive education,� and then offers a quote from Experience and Education:
Visitors to some progressive schools are shocked by the lack of manners they come across. One who knows the situation better is aware that to some extent their absence is due to the eager interest of children to go on with what they are doing. In their eagerness they may, for example, bump into each other and into visitors with no word of apology.
What Pawlik does not mention is that Experience and Education was specifically written to criticize both traditional schooling and the dominant strains of progressive education of the period. Dewey criticizes both approaches as falling prey to an Either-Or dualism that demands either rigid authoritarian control or completely unstructured indulgence of the child. And the very next lines after the passage Pawlik cites demonstrate this:
One might say that this condition is better than a display of merely external punctilio accompanying intellectual and emotional lack of interest in school work. But it also represents a failure in education, a failure to learn one of the most important lessons of life, that of mutual accommodation and adaptation. Education is going on in a one-sided way, for attitudes and habits are in process of formation that stand in the way of the future learning that springs from easy and ready contact and communication with others. (Later Works, Vol. 13, Page 38.)
I believe that the other quotes Pawlik provides are similarly incomplete, because she makes the same mistake that so many other critics of Dewey do. She assumes that because Dewey criticizes the idea of learning facts by rote, he is also criticizing the idea of requiring students to know anything. Instead, Dewey is making an observation that I think almost every student has from time to time. When education is simply an exercise in memorization, so that you can put the right answers on a test, the odds are pretty good you’re going to forget a lot of the information once the test is over, especially if you can’t see any reason to use the information. Dewey is looking for ways to make the material relevant and intersting to students, so they’ll be inclined to retain more of it. What decent teacher doesn’t think that’s a good idea?
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.