This Is Not News

Some short hits today: At the Wind Farm, Chris makes an analogy between the Alito confirmation hearings and Dewey’s Experience and Education. It’s an interesting post, although I wonder how Alito would feel about being used as an example to back up Dewey. I also think Chris may be a bit hasty in lumping Dewey and other progressive educators together.

Also in the irony department, there’s an essay at FrontPageMag.com that talks about hearings held by the state House at Temple University, about the perceived problem of liberal bias among university professors.Thomas Ryan cites a Temple prof by name as a particularly egregious example, and then quotes Dewey in his role as a founder of the American Association of University Professors in order to support his claim that professors should not push a political viewpoint on their students. My own thought is that at the college level, it is impossible to get a full “balance” in any individual course, just because a professor has to select what material to teach, and no one can teach everything. (That said, some teachers certainly make more of an effort to do so than others.) And one of the things that makes higher education so potentially rewarding is to encounter the unique voices of particular professors, learn from them, and challenge them. Of course, instructors need to play fair and not do things like penalize students who disagree with them. I tend to think that for the most part they do, but it’s clear that there are folks who disagree with that assessment.

Nimble Jack at Camshafts talks about Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, pragmatism, Habermas, and democracy. Worth checking out.

At The Modo Blog, fmodo examines the argument of a conservative in the 40s about moral absolutes. I admit to being pleasantly surprised to see the blog of a self-described “moderate Republican physician” approvingly cite Dewey’s system of ethics.

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?

Mark Wagner is back on the blogging beat with a discussion of Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed. It’s one of Dewey’s earlier works, so I haven’t studied it as much as I have his later writings. But Mark’s post is really good at analyzing Dewey from an educator’s perspective as opposed to a philosopher’s. And I’ve jumped in on the comments, so click on over if the last post doesn’t have enough talking about Dewey for you.

You’d think that conservative opponents of John Dewey would have their hands full dealing with what the man wrote over the course of his lifetime. But that hasn’t stopped some bizarre misquotes from working their way into the conversation. A few weeks ago my Technorati watchlist pulled up a blog that contained the following statement, alleged to be by Dewey:

You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.

Now, this sounds so completely unlike anything I’ve ever read Dewey say that I wondered where the quote came from. My curiosity was further encouraged when I did a web search and found the quote on hundreds of web pages – none of which could cite a particular text, lecture, or occasion on which Dewey said this. The closest I could find to an attribution was the year 1899 – which is the year that Dewey gave the lectures that formed the basis for The School and Society, one of his key books on education. So I turned to the Past Masters database, which contains a searchable full-text database of both The Collected Works of John Dewey and The Collected Correspondence of John Dewey. I put in various phrases from the longer quote and asked for results.

I came up empty.

I did some more searching in the archives of the electronic Dewey mailing list, and learned that a few years back, the users of that list tried to track down the original source of the quote as well. They had no more luck at pinning down the attribution than I did. So while I can’t completely rule out the idea that this quote was made in a context not included in the Collected Works or the Collected Correspondence, my best guess is that this is a caricature of a paraphrase that somehow came to be seen as a direct quote. The only other alternative I can think of is someone deliberately falsifying a citation, and I’d like to be more charitable than that.

As long as I was in the database, I decided to see what Dewey does say about the notion of children and people thinking for themselves. I got the following hits for the exact phrase “think for themselves” from Dewey’s published writings. (There were two additional hits, one from an account of an interview with Dewey, and one from an unpublished manuscript. I wanted to focus on the published instances for this post.)
Read the remainder of this entry »