Thinking About Learning
Education was a paramount concern for John Dewey during his career, as can be seen from some of his book titles: The Child and the Curriculum, The School and Society, Democracy and Education, and Experience and Education all concerned themselves chiefly with the topic. At the University of Chicago, he taught not only in the Philosophy department, but in Pedagogy as well. With his wife, he ran a model school at the university in which he could implement and test his theories; it was the removal of his wife from her position that led Dewey to leave Chicago for Columbia. Today, Dewey’s theories are still debated in professional academic literature, discussed in education programs, and even occasionally remarked on outside purely academic circles. Unfortunately, both in Dewey’s time and now, those positions are frequently mischaracterized and set up as straw men.
Dewey’s education theory was not merely focused on technical questions of curriculum and formal schooling. In Democracy and Education, he uses education in its broadest sense, as the fundamental activity of individual and social life. To understand this, it is necessary to explore the manner in which Dewey defines life. That which is living engages in an active effort to sustain and perpetuate itself, making use of its surroundings in a continuing attempt to achieve this goal. Nonliving objects are passive – they do not respond to changes in their environment with an expenditure of energies designed for self-preservation. If a force is bearing down on a rock, and the force is great enough to break the rock, the rock simply breaks; it does not attempt to shift or redirect the force so that its continued coherence is no longer at risk. Plants will send out roots to seek for water and move their leaves toward light sources; animals will seek out and even store food. Dewey describes growth as the restructuring of experience and the use of available resources in a process of self-perpetuation and self-renewal. Life strives to grow; it changes itself to overcome obstacles and take advantage of available opportunities. When growth stops completely, life ends. For human beings, growth is not merely a question of physical survival, but of intellectual and emotional flourishing – we grow in our ability to understand our surroundings, in our capability to act on and alter our environment; in doing so we develop and fulfill new potential not just for ourselves, but for the community to which we belong. For the individual, preparing for and experiencing these opportunities for growth is education.
Humanity is a unique form of life, both in its intellectual capability and in its ability to organize itself into different forms of social life, or cultures. Other living things may be organized into groups, and certain groups will attempt to perpetuate themselves, but – likely because they do not have the flexibility that humans do in responding to their environment – they do not have the variety of cultures that human beings do. Because of these complexities, flourishing and developing mean different things for humans than they do to other animals, whose needs can be more easily measured in purely physical terms. Groups attempt to maintain their integrity against attack, for example, and try to develop their subsequent generations in a way that perpetuates the character of the group’s beliefs and traditions.
“‘Life’ covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and defeats, recreations and occupations . . . education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.� (Democracy and Education, page 2)
This effort to perpetuate is not, however, always (or even often) an attempt to simply replicate the form of life that currently exists, since it is recognized that there are parts of that way of life that ultimately conflict with the goals of progress and development.
“As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better society.� (Democracy and Education, page 20)
This effort to identify and ultimately weed out some of the less-desirable elements of a form of life are, according to Dewey, encapsulated in the education process, in which we attempt to teach the next generation what behaviors and attitudes of the current generation should and should not be emulated.
Critics often dismiss Dewey as too permissive, of abandoning the need for standards in education. But what parts of itself society should pass on – and just as importantly, how it goes about doing so – were of paramount concern to him. In Experience and Education, he criticizes those education reformers who would let the child’s desires and interests totally shape the education process. Formal education does require a structure. But the type of structure that traditionalists have supported is ill-suited to the task of real education. Too often, education is taken to be the process of taking an established body of facts and information and getting the students to internalize that body through rote exercises. The problem is that this is done in an artificial environment, one that seems totally disconnected from the student’s life outside school. Students of every generation look at their textbooks and ask “When am I ever going to use this?� The attitude carries through to adulthood, where “book learning� and theories from the “ivory tower� are discounted because they don’t match up with common sense and experience in the “real world.�
Dewey’s answer to this was to make the school a more structured version of the real world. Classes in his school didn’t just sit at their desks; they worked on extensive projects. One class was responsible for planting and raising a small garden of food crops. The school day was balanced between actual work on the garden in which students tested various farming methods used throughout history, and classroom sessions where the students’ practical experience could be placed in context. Dewey didn’t want to totally remove the classroom, or remove the teacher from a position of authority. He just wanted to be sure that students had an equal opportunity to learn by doing – that rather than just listen to or read a recitation of facts, they would have the opportunity to “discover� these things for themselves. Students would learn to think, not just to recite things back to the teacher. The classroom experience would then be enhanced by its clear connection to the “real world� experience.
“If we have organization of equipment and of materials . .. we can direct the child’s activities, giving them exercise along certain lines, and can thus lead up to the goal which logically stands and the end of the paths followed.� (School and Society, page 37)
For any number of reasons, Dewey’s vision has not taken hold in American education. Some of that is because Dewey’s methods are difficult to execute – it’s not enough for a teacher to know the material to be covered, but the instructor also needs the psychological skills to guide the class activities in the proper ways. There also continues to be a mistrust of education methods that seem to be permissive, that aren’t focused on disseminating the established canon, on emphasizing the right way to do things. But Dewey’s ideas are not completely dead yet, although it shouldn’t be surprising that sometimes you have to look outside the classroom to see them in action. Alton Brown, host of Food Network’s Good Eats, once said the following in an interview (follow the link in the top-left frame):
The greatest, unexpected joy for me about making Good Eats is—and this is going to sound terrible—but it’s made me smart. Because I used to be, ‘Well, there’s physics [indicates a section of the table] and there’s biology and there’s chemistry over there and I don’t know what the hell that’s about, and over here’s this.’ And through food, I’ve come to understand something of each of those through their connectivity, by connecting them. By connecting the dots between anatomy and chemistry and history and anthropology, I’ve come to appreciate all of that and understand something of all of that.
I don’t know if Brown has ever read Dewey, but he sure gets the idea. There’s a great passage in School and Society where Dewey describes students experimenting in order to discover the right time and temperature to boil an egg, as well as prepare other foods. A frustrated student asks why they can’t simply follow a recipe, but the teacher guides the class in a discussion that makes them realize that just knowing the recipe will only tell them what to do – it won’t help them understand the why. And the why is where the real knowledge is.
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.