What follows are my reading notes and thoughts from John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, which have illuminated my understanding of what it means to be a teacher. Through reading Dewey, I have learned to focus on connecting material in the classroom to real, practical, day-to-day issues with which students grapple – and in which they are interested.
Now in many cases—too many cases—the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful.
Dewey really draws out the problem with a great deal of the educational process here – not just in the actual school system, but also the education that takes place at home with parents. I’m thinking of instances where parents train habits in their children that will be useful without explaining why or caring about the long term effects of such habits. The way we teach our children makes a huge difference, though.
The mistake is not in attaching importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation for a continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.
Dewey’s argument applies to a great deal of our education system today. School at all levels has become vocational over time, to the point that college degrees are often looked at as a path to a particular job, rather than the general liberal education in which it has its roots. Dewey is suggesting that this emphasis on the future can become so focused that we forget how much the present matters – and I think this is often the case. We tell our students to just jump through the hurdles so they can get their degree and so they can get their job – and all the while the educational process is suffering and our students learn to hate learning. The educational process itself should be beneficial and enjoyable in the moment.
To talk about an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk nonsense.
Dewey argues for a much more active role of the student in his or her own learning process. This process should be guided by their own interests and mentored by a teacher, rather than dictated. This reminds me somewhat of how my gifted education courses were growing up. We had much more freedom to explore topics we were interested in and also in ways that we were interested in. Throughout elementary and middle school, these were the only things I looked forward to in school. Most of my real learning took place at home – especially once I was able to access the Internet regularly.
The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher’s experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils.
This passage in particular sounds like it could have been written about state testing procedures that have taken over in the past few years. Dewey argues that this stifles the educational process and doesn’t let the teacher truly work with the students. This sounds accurate based on what I’ve heard from my friends in the educational field.
And we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis—that is, such things as are taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation;
This harkens back to my thoughts on the emphasis of job preparation in current schooling. There certainly was historically a need to teach these skills, but I don’t believe this need is still as pressing as it once was. Today we see that because of how fast technology advances, students will be working at jobs that didn’t even exist while they were in school. How can we continue to train for specific jobs when we can’t even know what those jobs will be?
Dewey hasn’t addressed this thought – at least so far, but it seems to me that there are more general skills that can be taught to better help prepare students for the world they will face. Skills like critical thinking and philosophy that help them prepare to understand the world around them.
Although vocational education may have once been useful, and may still be in limited circumstances, I’m suggesting that it is entirely over-used and over-emphasized in today’s fast paced world.
To make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have been applied to the doctrine of interest in education.
This next section of the book does begin to emphasize – though in very broad strokes – better ways to go about teaching. For Dewey, everything seems to rest on connecting the material to be learned back to how it actually affects our lives. This is extremely important to me, and something that has been missing from much of my education. It also appears to be severely lacking in much of the work in contemporary philosophy.
Dewey gives the example that babies don’t study walking and talking because it is a subject that must be done, rather, it relies on natural impulses for things they want to do, and so they practice it through experience and eventually learn it. He is suggesting most, if not all learning should be much more similar to this. We should go with a child’s natural instincts and show them how the material connects to things they are already interested in.
One who recognizes the importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook.
In many ways, this makes teaching all the more challenging. The very same material may be applicable to the lives of 10 different students in 10 different ways. The job of the teacher is to help each student see that connection. For me, this speaks to the ridiculousness of having a 500 student seminar course at college. There is no way a student can get the kind of interaction and customization needed to really learn material.
In addition to state testing, I think these massive courses at the college level, as well as the way that many (most?) online courses are structured, are also a symptom of how broken the college model of education has also become. The interests of individual students are being left out of the process.
Dewey compares teaching to art. There are standard things that need to be learned – a painter must know about canvases and paints and pigments, but the way these are combined is where the art shines through. Similarly, a teacher must know basic pedagogic strategies, but the way they are combined to help a particular student is where the art of teaching shines through.
One wholly indifferent to the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all. From this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation will surely make a mistake in calculation.
This passage stood out to me because my partner and I were recently discussing the significance of everyone feeling (unrealistically) the need to have an opinion on every topic, and in addition, be right about their opinion. Dewey points out that it is natural to have this type of impulse to have an opinion – that’s the very definition of interest. The key is not letting our desire to be “right” and our own personal preferences or desires affect our thinking. This is the advanced step that many are missing.
Only gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great significance for education.
And the next step after learning to keep our hopes and desires out of interpretations is expanding our interests. This is the type of thinking that I believe is important for students to learn. Learning how to think critically is an important skill that is not emphasized in school.
The occasions and material of thought are not found in the arithmetic or the history or geography itself, but in skillfully adapting that material to the teacher’s requirements. The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school system and school authority, not the nominal “studies.”
Dewey once again focuses on problems with the education system, that depressingly still ring true today. Even among many of the best and brightest students I encounter, there is more concern with learning how to get an “A” in a course than there is in learning the material in the course. Dewey suggests this is but another symptom of divorcing subject matter from its connection to our actual real lives outside of the school.
The accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction in recitation and examination is made too much of. “Knowledge,” in the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things. Frequently it is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for.
This in particular is an issue I noticed as early as high school, and was the focus of much of my work in the study of knowledge (epistemology). I have tried to make a distinction between knowing and understanding. This is a subtle point that requires a lot of explanation, but as briefly as possible, I believe that the memorizing of facts and knowledge of certain propositions is different from “seeing” the “why” of these things and understanding the reason behind them.
I didn’t encounter a class that truly emphasized understanding until I was in college, and I believe that’s a huge problem with our education system.
One of his themes that has been on my mind is that passing on communities through education is important, but the size of that community affects what gets passed on. I believe that this reflection is extremely important when considering the current educational system in the U.S. We are trying to set national standards for a huge geographical area with a wide, wide variation in beliefs. When considered from that perspective, it seems obvious how much trouble it might be trying to set one national curriculum.
If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction.
In our school system there’s a huge focus on knowing things and learning them by memorization. Dewey is here suggesting that this is simply an outgrowth of the way our philosophers and logicians understand what knowledge is. I concur with him 100% here. I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to show that knowledge is something more than simply knowing facts. However, the most widely accepted definition of knowledge in the philosophical realm is a “justified, true, belief.”
It is now so bulky that the impossibility of any one man’s coming into possession of it all is obvious. But the educational ideal has not been much affected. Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch of learning, or at least in a selected group, remains the principle by which the curriculum, from elementary school through college, is formed;
Dewey is here explaining that the amount of knowledge we as a world have available to us has grown at an incredible pace since we first set up our educational institutions, and yet, the education system remains the same. “Information used to be as rare and precious as gold. (It is estimated that one weekday edition of today’s New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime.)” There’s no way that we can memorize all of this information, and there’s no longer a reason to, either. Access to books and the internet put much of this information at our fingertips. The much more important and urgent mandate is to know how to interpret and use all of this information. Critical thinking skills are more important than ever!
The way to enable a student to apprehend the instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends upon ability to use number.
Application to the real world. This has been said over and over again. What I want to make sure is obvious though is that for Dewey this does not necessarily mean application to a career. I think a lot of people who write about Dewey make the assumption that all he supports is vocational training, and that’s not true. When I say application to the real world, I mean the things people are interested in outside of school. Some of that might ultimately tie into a career, but it might also be hobbies or things about which we are simply curious.
The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual hesitation; it is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. Familiarity, common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,—a greater foe to learning than ignorance itself… A Socrates is thus led to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.
For me, this is an extremely significant passage, as I believe it gets to the root of a lot of the issues we face as a country, especially in the realm of religion and politics. Rather than admitting ignorance, many people prefer strong opinions that have nothing to back them up. There is a fear of being uncertain about things. I have told people that my views and beliefs are always open to revision, and that’s why I still enjoy having conversations about these topics again and again – especially with people I tend to disagree with. This was shocking to them.
It’s only becoming more and more apparent to me as I get older that being able to declare one’s own ignorance, and limited understanding, truly is one of the most important aspects of becoming wise. It’s ok not to know everything. It’s okay to always be open to revising what we believe. This is an important message that needs to be understood.
The last section of Dewey’s Democracy and Education discussed the importance of the scientific method to the way we now learn. He argued that this method broke down the opposition that had existed between rationalism and empiricism in philosophy. Now, empiricism was called to check on that which reason and theory suggested in a way that it never had been before, and he believes this is a vast improvement in the way we acquire knowledge. The theory, in turn, gives context to our sense experience. Show the students why these skills matter now, don’t lecture on why they will matter some day.
But when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a few years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature, and history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage of this opportunity. More fundamental is the fact that the great majority of workers have no insight into the social aims of their pursuits and no direct personal interest in them.
Here, I take Dewey to be arguing for a liberal education, saying that vocational training alone is not enough. Good citizens need to understand the context of their jobs, why they are important, and also have a personal interest in them in order to truly do them well. A full education, for Dewey, would cover all aspects of this, and not just the vocational skills.
Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade. Neither men’s hearts nor their minds are in their work.
How many people pick their college major or career based on the amount of money that they expect to make? In context, Dewey argues that if we change our education system, we will see a change in this perspective. He also worries that this would lead to the tendency to only do vocational training, which is not what he wants.
Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed by authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the responsibility of directing their activity by thought. They tend to confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers.
I found this passage from Dewey particularly interesting. In my own observations, I find this to be spot on, in every aspect of life. We as people find it much easier to put our belief, or faith, in something, rather than to do the hard work of thinking things through ourselves and coming to conclusions. And by extension, this would be the easiest thing for the schools to help us do. Critical thinking and rational inquiry are tough. They take practice. And the results can be disruptive to traditions. But for an educated and democratic society, this is ultimately necessary.
My previous conceptions of Dewey, made without ever having read any Dewey directly and based solely on references and second hand comments about Dewey, was that his pragmatic education theory very much suggested vocational training.
What I have taken away from this reading is that vocational training is important – we should have our students doing the hands on type of work for the careers they will be doing but with two important caveats:
- This should not be too specific. Jobs change, needed skills change, expectations change. They need general vocational training that can be applied widely.
- This vocational training should be in the context of a larger liberal education. This is never stated straightforwardly and explicitly, but I believe it is clearly supported.
In conclusion, much of what I’ve experienced others saying and writing about Dewey seems to be a simplified and therefore inaccurate picture of Dewey.
(This piece has been adapted from a series of posts originally published on my blog, PhilosophyMatters.org)