Some thoughts on Dewey

John Dewey attempted to do the impossible – link education to culture by way of the democratic ideal. Dewey’s view of democracy was one rooted somewhat in altruism, or at least, that was his initial goal. Dewey wrote in Experience and Education (1938) that democracy promotes a better quality human experience for the most members of society. Dewey’s early focus in education was rooted in this idea so his focus naturally was to build what he labeled as “democratic” schools. For Dewey, a school, by its very nature, must be part of the community. There were two fundamental criteria for his school: first, the school must be a community in which every aspect of the school is in essence a teachable moment. The second, the school should foster learning that is continuous and ongoing outside of school.

For Dewey, education was his main agency for cultural formation, but as Dewey grew older, he lost faith in this role for education. Dewey was a meliorist and it is this belief in an improving world aided by humans, that I believe, was a contributing factor to his increased pessimism in the cultural role of education. If, as Dewey believed, the world was improving and that improvement was aided and hastened by human beings, then, naturally, one of the best mechanisms for aiding the world was the processes of education. Dewey believed in a cumulative progress of culture, but in my opinion, Dewey got a few things wrong. First, he did not factor into his views the idea of power and its role in an evolving culture (I do not use the term "evolving" here in the evolutionary scientific sense but merely as a means of reference to the continuous movement of culture as opposed to the view that culture is stagnate.). Secondly, Dewey saw the structure of the economy as the central obstacle of a more just society (Schultz, 2001, p.280.). He did not see other areas as obstacles in the same way that he say the economic structure nor did he anticipate their influences on the educational process.

During Dewey's time the scientific method was growing in popularity and power. He embraced it and all of the new forces it produced, viewing it as the change that would allow education to take its rightful place as the cultural change agency he thought it was. This did not take place, and in my opinion, Dewey, here, underestimates severely the power of the industrialization and the hunger that profit and power would produce in people. The combination of these events would cause him to move away from his meliorist ways and embrace a view that society was more stagnate than he had anticipated. 

Dewey gradually recognized the problem of uniting his "democratic" school so closely to culture. He realized that this union would provide a pathway for power to enter education and eventually overtake it and consume it. Since he believed that schools were agents of culture he was concerned that schools would become not only agents of culture but agents of power capable of changing culture, but not in just ways as Dewey had visioned. Dewey felt that he had given society a tool for social change and now that tool had been hijacked by the powerful to be used for change that benefited the powerful and not society as a whole.

Is Dewey right? Has it come to that? Are schools now agents of culture and power capable of adding power to the most powerful? If our answer to any of these questions is yes, then, we must ask the next immediate question: where do our students fit into this process? Dewey believed in an educational process that included the student and one that educated the whole student. If the process is now mostly a process of collective cultural change, are we even educating individual students anymore? Hmmm?  

Schutz, Aaron. (2001) John Dewey’s conundrum: Can democratic schools empower. Teachers College Record, 103 (2), 267-302.