This Is Not News

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.

I was scanning Tapped, the blog for The American Prospect, when I found this post by Matt Yglesias about a debate he’s been having with Jonah Goldberg. At risk of either a) ignoring the context of the original discussion and/or b) opening up an uncessary additional front, there were a couple of things that got me thinking.

The core of the conversation seems to be about the status of ethical statements and whether they can be factually right or wrong. Do we treat “Stealing is wrong” as being true or false in the same was that we treat “It’s raining outside” as true or false. Goldberg and many other moral conservatives think so, and that’s what tends to get them irked at pragmatists and other philosophers whom they accuse of being relativists, or folks who think anything goes, ethically. I actually think that pragmatists preserve more of a notion of ethical truths than Yglesias’s position, but either way there’s more pluralism than some folks want to accept.

Anyway, what interests me are a couple of things that Yglesias says. First, there’s this:

When you argue with people, you try to appeal to shared sentiments, point out alleged inconsistencies in the other guy’s position, and so on and so forth. What underlies the possibility of discussion isn’t objective moral truth but the fact that, say, Jonah and I have a vast stockpile of things we agree about and one tries to resolve controversies with appeals to stuff in that store of previous agreement.

That sets up this point:

Sometimes you face someone whose disagreements with you are so profound that appeals to shared premises don’t get you anywhere. Or you face someone who just doesn’t care about doing the right thing. It’s precisely because there’s no way to decide who’s objectively right in a dispute between, say, Adolf Hitler and liberal democracy, that we resolve the biggest moral controversies with force and threats of force rather than moral discourse and appeals to conscience. Debate and deliberation only work for the small stuff.

Now, I’m in a good mood, so I’m more in pie-in-the-sky idealist mode. But I’m wondering if the problem between liberal democracy and Adolf Hitler isn’t that moral discourse fails, but that it never begins. I mean, let’s say that instead of invading Poland, conquering Czechoslovakia, and setting up concentration camps, Hitler had just proposed invading Poland, conquering Czechoslovakia, and setting up concentration camps. And then folks responded that this was not a great idea, and was in fact morally wrong, and tried to convince Hitler of this. Meanwhile, Hitler would be trying to convince us of the opposite. If we imagine that the conversation could go on as long as it took, could we imagine convincing Hitler that it’s all a bad idea, and not likely to accomplish what he wants to accomplish to boot?

Now, obviously, to make this work we have to imagine a Hitler who is more patient and more open to external ideas than the actual Hitler was. And ultimately, that’s the problem. There are some people for whom moral discourse or deliberation is not a value that they hold. They literally won’t start the conversation, and sometimes they provoke conflicts with those who do believe in deliberation.

Now, by definition, if valuing deliberation is a moral position, then if someone gets into moral deliberation with you, they already are in a substantial agreement with you, and maybe everything else looks like “small stuff” in comparison. But what about those folks who don’t accept deliberation as a moral value? It seems that we’re stuck with what Yglesias talks about, having to use force to settle the issue. Now, the one out that I leave myself there is that I think that people tend to discover that deliberation works pretty well on questions of fact, which is how the scientific process has been successful. So I think there’s some potential for getting folks to extend that set of skills to moral questions. But getting that agreement would likely take a much longer conversation than is practical or even possible, which means that sometimes in the real world we face the kind of conflict Yglesias describes, where there’s nothing to do but see which side wins.

Well, it’s official. I’ve defended the thesis, turned in the final copy, written the last of my term papers, and paid off all my library fines. Today I received my diploma from Temple, and I am officially a Ph.D. in Philosophy, possibly the most redundant degree ever. 🙂

There’s a lot of housecleaning to do, along with the not insignificant matter of finding a job, but I do intend to return to near-daily blogging from here on out. I just may steer clear of the heavy philosophical stuff for another few days. 🙂

I wanted to start making these posts weeks ago, but got sidetracked. I’ve already tried to put a Deweyan notion of democracy into a nutshell here. I’d like to start talking about a vein of democratic theory that’s seen a lot of activity in the last couple of decades, deliberative democracy. Depending on how you view it, it can be a complement or an alternative to the Deweyan notion, but we’ll have time to talk about that later. For now I want to sketch a definition and present one of the key discussion points within the ranks of those who call themselves deliberative democrats. Read the remainder of this entry »

Couple of Dewey citations with an artistic theme in the blogosphere this week:

Alex Starace at Professor Yeti mentions Art as Experience as part of a discussion of how art can communication vital emotional and contextual information that can’t be boiled down to mere facts. It’s a very interesting piece, although I kinda wish there was some mention of Dewey’s parallel argument in Experience and Nature that science and thinking is, itself, a kind of art, although in that case Dewey was defining art much more broadly.

Meanwhile, Rob Comber at Controlled by Remote uses one of my favorite passages from Art as Experience to talk about the different user experiences provided by different models of web site. A brief but interesting post.

With the start of a new academic semester, it seems a lot of education students are reading, talking, and blogging about Dewey. Here’s a sampling of some comments:

• Senorita Teacher wonders whether the Deweyan idea of “starting where the child is” can be effective at higher grade levels.
• Shannon at My Life Becoming a Teacher reflects on Dewey’s thoughts on education as social and calls Dewey’s words empowering.
• DancnTeach responds to a line from “Pedagogic Creed:”
  

  I believe that education, therfore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

• Kristin at Cute as a Button wonders if Dewey’s ideas are still relevant today, and whether implementing them is in any way realistic.
• Tirade25 at Tirade Parade reflects on her unpleasant experience within an education program, where she feels that Deweyan ideology replaced the actual teaching of techniques and skills. Ironically enough, she notes in the comments, a Deweyan learn-by-doing approach was not actually implemented in these programs. (I admit I have struggled myself from time to time with the notion of lecturing on Dewey. It seems somehow counterproductive, and yet at the moment that’s the system we work with.)

I also came across two posts that conflate Dewey with the idea of completely unstructured or child-dominated education. One cites the possibility of a negative progressive-ed influence on home schooling. This may or may not be a valid critique of certain forms of progressive-ed in home schooling, but as I’ve said before, Dewey’s concept of education was not devoid of structure. The other post , and another blames the Laboratory School at Chicago for ushering in an age of lower literacy. I just have a hard time reconciling that last claim with Dewey’s idea that art and literature were so important to education. It’s not the first time I’ve seen the charge though, so I think I’m going to need to hunt down some reliable statistics on literacy in Western societies.

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 »