This Is Not News

When I watched President Obama’s inaugural speech today, I was struck by how he tied the speech together by the idea of what we do together, as “We, the people.” And I have to say, I think John Dewey would have found a lot to like in his fellow faculty member of the University of Chicago.

Dewey often wrote that that individual freedom and collective action relied on one another. The work we do as a society creates the environment and conditions in which individuals make their choices and have the opportunity to achieve their goals. The decisions of individuals to participate in society with their unique perspectives and talents makes that society function. President Obama and others talked about during the campaign; Elizabeth Warren talked about it, and the President got some flak for the way he phrased his “You didn’t build that” comments about infrastructure and education. I think that today he captured that idea very well in this paragraph:

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.

Dewey also stressed that democracy is about more than electoral institutions, but in the ongoing participation of citizens in deciding the future of our society. President Obama stressed that idea at the close of his speech:

They are the words of citizens and they represent our greatest hope. You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course. You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time — not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.

I’ll be very interested in seeing how the president uses his retooled campaign organization, now called Organizing for Action, to encourage that participation. I expect, and I hope, that he will use it to encourage citizens to raise their voices in support of these ideas:

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. (Applause.) Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law –- (applause) — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. (Applause.) Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. (Applause.) Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity — (applause) — until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. (Applause.) Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.

It’s an ambitious checklist, for sure. But it’s a fine vision for an America that is more truly democratic. I’d say that day 1 of four more years was a definite success.

The first time I met Chris Lehmann, one of the things we talked about was the notion that educators shouldn’t just read John Dewey; from time to time they should reread Dewey to keep in mind his ideas about the experiences that truly teach us. I nodded my head, finished my dissertation, and while I have reread a couple of essays in the 6 years since, I have not really sat down and reacquainted myself with the work.

So I was pretty happy when I saw that Zac Chase was blogging his experiences reading Dewey’s Experience and Education in a series of posts at his blog, Autodizactic. I decided to take the invitation and reread the book along with his series. I tended to focus more on Democracy and Education, and to a lesser extent Art as Experience and The Quest for Certainty, but as I decipher my notes from the margins I can see that I made use of this text as well. 🙂

In the opening post in his series, Zac sets out a number of themes.

First, he establishes the division in education theory; in Dewey’s time he described this as between “traditionalists” and “progressives.” But even as he used those labels, Dewey warned of the trap of Either-Or thinking, where every issue gets divided into two extremes with no room for nuance. Interestingly, Zac says that this “sets up the battle of progressives and traditionalists (today’s reformers).” The way that Zac sets that sentence up, it suggests that the people who most frequently call themselves education reformers really have a very old idea idea about education and want to find ways to return to an older status quo. If I’m reading him right, I agree with him. This is the sense I’ve gotten from President Obama when I hear him talk about education. His grandmother got a strong enough education in high school to be be able to support a career in the banking industry, and his mother made him get up early to do more studying when he was a kid living in Indonesia. When I see the president support things like longer school days and “career-ready standards,” it feels to me like he’s trying to recreate this experience for others, in part because it worked reasonably well for his family. But there is a weird angle to this for me, in that the title of reformer implies that one wants to change something, and from my own experience I wonder when the traditionalist view was ever out of fashion enough that one could change anything by returning to it. (More on that in a second.)

Second, Zac distinguishes between Dewey’s actual position and the caricature so often made of Dewey and “progressive” education in general. While the caricature says that Dewey and other pragmatists believe that anything goes and whatever works for you is true, the truth is that Dewey was perfectly willing to have rules and systems in schools and learning so long as those rules and systems actually help people get someplace. How do we know about what will get us someplace? Well, that’s detailed at great length in the other works I mentioned, but even in this book Dewey wants to talk about a definition for experience. And it’s not surprising that Dewey is looking for something that is overlooked by both sides of the theoretical argument – since those sides are trapped in the Either-Or thinking, they’ve lost the ability to look for what actually works. In rereading, I took note of Dewey’s statement in the preface:

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that is unwillingly controlled by them.

Dewey kept looking for that new ground that wasn’t boxed in by theoretical assumptions, and I think Zac is right that we should continue to prioritize that today.

Finally, Zac asks a question that I started asking when I first dove into pragmatic philosophy over a decade ago: if Dewey was able to tell us all of this in the time from 1890 to 1940, why have we done so little to implement these ideas in the 21st century? That tied back to my point about traditionalists rebranding themselves as reformers. Maybe you could make the case that Dewey’s ideas were and are influential within the academic field of education theory. But in the world of education practice, one that is still controlled by politicians and by citizens elected to school boards, I don’t think these ideas ever took hold. They were, and are, a radical change from the way human beings thought of education for so long. From time to time we can see those ideas implemented to one degree or another, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make them mainstream. That’s why I’m glad there are so many teachers/writers/theorists who are making the argument outside of academia, in their schools, on Twitter, on their blogs, and in the ongoing educational debate. Maybe in another few decades, we won’t still be scratching our heads and wondering why Dewey’s questions are still so valid.

The thing that I most enjoyed about the talk of the trillion-dollar platinum coin is that it brought to the forefront the idea that money isn’t a real thing. It’s something we make up, and it works because we all agree that it works. It doesn’t have to follow the laws of physics or anything else – as long as we collectively will it to be so, it is. (I do think this is a drawback of the coin idea – even though according to the rules, it probably would have technically worked, I think it would have been too hard for too many people to maintain their suspension of disbelief, and then the whole structure comes tumbling down.) It’s nice to have a reminder that we are active constructors of our world, and maybe to think about what we should do with that responsibility.

I wrote my dissertation between 2002 and 2006. Since then I’ve gone back to school to get a Master’s degree in education so that I could be certified as a high school teacher. I’ve been an adjunct in philosophy alongside my day job as a social studies teacher, so I haven’t left the philosophical world entirely. But I’ve been wondering lately if I should pick up some of the academic threads I’ve left laying around since I defended my thesis.

At this point I don’t know if going back into a six-year-old thesis and trying to bring it up to date is my best move. But I might be able to take the themes and a lot of the ideas and find a way to use them in a new way. What I’d like to do in this post is sketch out a mini-proposal and then ask for feedback, especially for any readers in the education community. If this sounds like something that might be a useful part of the dialogue, I’ll pursue it.

First, some context. My dissertation was an attempt to take John Dewey’s work on philosophy, education, and democracy and show how the pieces fit together, and then use that information to construct a vision for what democratic reform should aspire to achieve. Its rough structure was as follows:

• Chapter 1 outlined Dewey’s philosophical position on the nature of the world and our knowledge of it, especially his philosophical pragmatism and his argument in favor of a method of scientific thinking.
• Chapter 2 applied that scientific method to questions of right and wrong in order to try to answer the question, “How should we live our life?” The basic answer was that we should live our life in a way that allows all of us to grow as people.
• Chapter 3 continued that argument and stated that the best way for us to grow as people was to live in a truly democratic culture and society, where people work together to understand the world and the effects of their actions. Dewey’s theory of democracy was compared to other theories, especially those within the field of “deliberative democracy.”
• Chapter 4 asked the question, “if building a democratic culture is the right thing to do, how do we do it?” I constructed a ten-point model of guidelines that reformers should try to achieve in order to increase their success.
• Chapter 5 tested the model by examining the history of the settlement house movement, especially the work of Jane Addams and others at Hull House.
• Chapter 6 tested the model by examining the history of the black civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
• Chapter 7 was basically a conclusion, but I also noted that one thing that Dewey had not really accounted for is the potential of war to derail any efforts at democratic improvement.

Now, this historical work in chapters 5 and 6 was based almost completely on secondary sources. Part of me would love to do more case studies – I have a hunch that in a few years, there’s going to be a lot of fascinating documentation of the relationship between Barack Obama’s grassroots volunteers and the central staff, and there are lots of lessons to be learned from the Occupy movement. But what I’m thinking is that maybe now I could use the research and first hand experience I’ve had with education in the last six years to focus more specially on the relationship between education and democracy.

What I’m thinking of is something like a three or four part project.

• Part 1 would articulate a theory of democracy, still heavily influenced by Dewey. Maybe something like a condensed version of chapters 1 and 2 from the thesis and elaboration/updating of chapter 3.
• Part 2 would ask what citizens would need to know, understand, and do in such a democracy and envision how schools could help build these skills and practices. It would probably be built around a version of the model from chapter 4, but with the more specific aim of creating a school as a democratic reform movement.
• Part 3 would discuss the reasons why few, if any, American schools resemble the model from Part 2. This would be a combination of academic research on education and educational psychology; policy wonk discussion of current laws, practices, and structures; and reflections and observations from my own teaching experience. The disconnect between the research and the practice, especially in the political/lawmaking sphere, would have a heavy focus.
• Part 4 would discuss reasons for optimism and try to point out some directions for future improvement. Again, there’d be a mix of academic research and personal reflections, although I think I would also like to talk to a lot of the teachers I know online and offline to add their insights as well.

I think this could be an interesting book, and I think I could do a good job writing it. I honestly don’t know if it would produce anything journal-worthy, but that’s not a super-high priority. I could just as easily self-publish an e-book and make it available on the site and wherever else I could. What matters to me is, would I be adding anything of value to the conversation?

That’s where I could really use some feedback. If a book, or a series of articles, or what-have-you, like this is something that you think you would read and discuss and value (on the assumption that it’s any good), please let me know. If it’s not your thing, or you don’t think it adds anything useful to the discussion, I’d like to hear that too.

My next step would be to flesh out this rough idea into a more detailed outline/proposal, which would be another opportunity for feedback and discussion. But this is my attempt to get the ball rolling. What do you think?

I started rereading part of my dissertation today. It’s been six years since I defended it and finished my Ph.D. Since then I haven’t done a lot of purely philosophical writing. I went right back to grad school to study education, and then I started learning-and-thinking about teaching by doing. I think philosophy gave me a very transferable set of skills that are useful as I try to absorb more information about the world and how it works, and I continue to teach adjunct courses in the field. So by no means would I say I’ve left philosophy behind. But I’m not really part of the conversation within the discipline. I have no idea what’s being published in the field. Frankly I don’t even know if defining and understanding democracy is a matter of much concern to professional philosophers these days. I wonder sometimes if I should try to stick my nose back into that conversation. Would I have anything to say? Am I too much of a jack of all trades at this point to be master of any one?

I think that right now I need to be in the classroom every day, working with a group of students and trying to create a caring atmosphere of inquiry. I hope I have built the skills to help me achieve that goal. But the way that we’re doing things as a society isn’t working. We need to change up the game. Can I help make that happen by being a part of an academic conversation? Or is this conversation, this ability to throw an idea out to the electronic wilds, the place where I can be the kind of thinker I want to be? Maybe I won’t get published in a journal, but maybe I’ll have a chance at a greater impact. Education blogs and my teacher-centric Twitter feeds might be the new academy.

I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I still don’t know. I need to take another step, somewhere. I need to be better. But the first part of that is that I need to figure out where.

When people ask about the advantages of studying philosophy, one of the things you often hear is that the discipline helps promote “critical thinking.” We hear a lot about how it’s important for schools to help develop students’ critical thinking skills. But the precise nature of those skills is a little vague. What do we mean when we say someone is thinking critically? For that matter, what would it look like to think uncritically?

It actually took me a few years of teaching philosophy courses to develop a short answer to these questions that I could put on the syllabus. I’m a little miffed that I took so long, but I’m pretty happy with the final result. I share it here as an invitation to criticize my thinking about critical thinking. 🙂

Philosophy is often described as a discipline that improves critical thinking skills. What does that mean? I believe that two questions are central to philosophy: “Why?” and “What if?”

When we ask “What if?” we are using our imaginations and our intelligence to figure out the consequences of an event or an idea. We want to know as much as possible about how the world – or our lives – would be different if one particular claim were to be true.

Not coincidentally, science fiction got me asking these questions at an early age. I suspect that’s why I remain hooked on both SF and philosophy. What do you think?

This post is discussing a bit of old news, but it may be relevant news in light of recent events. Over the weekend I came across this old post from Scientific American’s Bering in Mind blog. There are two parts to the post, and both are worth discussing. There’s a report on recent studies about how ideas can affect behavior, and a discussion of the “Would you kill Hitler as a child?” question. I’ll start with the former, even though the blog author leads off with the latter.

Bering cites two studies that indicate that when people have been primed to think about, or accept, the position of determinism, they are more likely to engage in less ethical behaviors. Here’s how Bering describes one of the studies.

In fact, a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the idea of free will, such as, “I demonstrate my free will every day when I make decisions” or those who simply read neutral statements, such as, “Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface.” Participants who’d been randomly assigned to the deterministic condition, for example, were less likely than those from the other two groups to give money to a homeless person, or to allow a classmate to use their cellular phone.

Now, it’s important to note that results like this do not provide evidence for or against determinism. You could say that the results happen because we do have free will, but when we think about the idea that we don’t, we give ourselves more leeway to be selfish. Or you could say that we do not have free will, and that somehow whatever part of our brain is activated when we think about determinism also causes an increase in selfish behaviors. The question is, what do we do with the results? Do we say that even if determinism is true, the results of acknowledging that truth are so negative that we should not do it? Or do we find some way to build up a buffer, to help introduce a counter-force that will lead people to less antisocial behavior?

The irony, of course, is that if human behavior is fully determined, the question of what we should do is irrelevant, because we are going to do what we are going to do. But our asking and pondering of the irrelevant question can not be prevented by our understanding of its irrelevance, because we are determined to do it. So we can really only hope that our deterministic process is leading us to a result that we find desirable. (Or maybe we can’t hope anything at all, if we are so determined.)

If determinism is false, then it seems like we need to find a way to emphasize responsibility even when discussing determinism. Stay away from talking about fate and maybe even the idea that everything happens for a reason. Point out that if what we do is determined by who we are and the circumstances that we find ourselves in, our brains and minds possess the structures that can produce beneficial choices. If who I am determines what I do, let me be the best me that I can. I’m not sure the idea hangs together coherently, but again, we’re trying to discuss the idea of determinism without losing sight of personal responsibility.

You can see the tension I’m talking about in Bering’s discussion of the question, “Would you kill Hitler as a child?” He says that he can’t help but feel that Hitler could have prevented the Holocaust; that regardless of social forces Hitler had the choice not to be so destructive. He didn’t make that choice, so he must be inherently evil, and therefore deserves to die. But if Hitler is essentially evil, then it was never possible for him to choose good. So his essence, or nature, is what determined his actions, and there was never any choice. If there was no choice, was there responsibility?

As for me, I wouldn’t do it. I can’t reliably predict the effect of Hitler’s death. If could see a fairly direct link between saving lives and killing someone, I could see the argument. But in a more nebulous situation, all I have to go by is my own ethical compass, which doesn’t support homicide.

I’ve been loosely following the goings-on in the Screen Actors Guild negotiations, and I admit that much of my info seems to come from the dueling statements by various factions which are reposted on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood site, but it strikes me that there’s a really interesting case study here of an idea I’ve seen expressed by Gandhi (and certainly elsewhere). In a nutshell, SAG has gotten nowhere in its negotiations with the main group of production companies, the AMPTP. In order to try to gain some leverage in the negotiations, the national board of SAG wants to hold a strike authorization vote. They don’t actually want to strike yet, they just want to make it clear that a strike is a possibility if a suitable deal isn’t worked out. Various factions within SAG, along with many unions and industry participants outside of SAG, make the argument that given the current economy, it’s a terrible time to strike and possibly put people out of work, and SAG should just hurry up and try to get the best contract it can now.

OK, so where’s the Gandhi come in? One of the major tenets of his strategy of non-cooperation was that no minority can exploit a larger group without that group’s permission and cooperation. If the larger group simply refuses to cooperate, then the smaller group can not accomplish any of the things it wants to accomplish and therefore can not benefit from the oppression. In the case of India, Britain could gain no advantage from its empire without the labor of the colonial subjects, the general acceptance of colonial rule, and the work of native administrators and officials. If every man, woman and child in India refused to do any work that would benefit the British Empire, the British in India would be at a loss and Britain itself would gain no raw materials or profitable market. The oppressed must go along with their oppression. Why would the oppressed willingly cooperate with their oppressors? Because the oppressors have the power to inflict suffering. They can take away what small amount of resources and freedom the oppressed have obtained for themselves. They can even take away the oppressed’s lives. And so, in order to preserve the small bit that they have, the oppressed cooperate and do not demand the much greater amount of resources and freedom to which they are entitled. You know the expression that no one is more dangerous than someone with nothing left to lose? Well, the flip side is that if you give someone just a tiny amount to lose, they become a whole lot less dangerous. Read the remainder of this entry »

I managed to get sucked into a discussion of pragmatism as it’s understood politically vs. how it’s understood philosophically. There are some things I want some time to chew on, especially regarding the political weakness of Dewey’s pragmatism. But it’s a pretty good discussion as it stands.

As my noodling about deliberation intersects with my near-obsessive following of Democratic presidential delegate selection results, it is probably worth examining the undercurrent of controversy about the use of caucuses in some states to select delegates. The argument for caucuses is that they encourage interaction between voters, encourages people to stand behind their choices, and allows for some chance of voters persuading each other to change their minds. All of these are similar to the advantages proposed by deliberation. Many supporters of Hillary Clinton’s campaign have pointed out a potential downside – there is a limited time window and a long time commitment required than in a straightforward election. This drives down participation because some people are unwilling or unable to participate. As much as I have enjoyed Barack Obama’s advantage in garnering support from caucus states, I can definitely see the point here and would certainly support any state that wanted to move from a caucus to a primary. So do various deliberation schemes suffer from the same problem? Well, if you’re doing a deliberative panel to work on a specific issue, you’re going to need to build some support for lost wages, child care concerns, and similar considerations. If you wanted to do a larger-scale deliberation project, you’re probably going to need to space it out over a period of days. I think participation is worth the costs, but it’s worth looking at the practical examples in order to appreciate just how large that cost is.