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.