Professional Documents
Culture Documents
After Dewey
PA U L FA I R F I E L D
Continuum International Publishing Group
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www.continuumbooks.com
Paul Fairfield has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
LB14.7.F33 2009
370.1--dc22
2009012059
Contents
Index 305
For Gwyneth Fairfield
Chapter 1
All references to John Dewey’s texts are from The Collected Works, 1882–
1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston and published by Southern Illinois
University Press. In the endnotes, EW refers to The Early Works, 1882–
1898 (5 volumes), MW refers to The Middle Works, 1899–1924 (15
volumes), and LW refers to The Later Works, 1925–1953 (17 volumes).
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Introduction
An Enigmatic Transition
1
2 Introduction
are in the maelstrom of empirical studies and social realities, politics and
religion, philosophy and other philosophies, psychology and other psy-
chologies, and lacking the autonomy proper to any professional to form and
act on their own judgment.
The real world of education is a miscellany of often irreconcilable aims,
imperatives, and fashions, many of which are extraneous to the practice and
simply imposed from without, and all of which individual educators must
square in some precarious way with the realities of the classroom. To get our
bearings we must gain a more explicit understanding of the transition noted
above and the principles that belong to it. There is, as I shall argue, a logic
that is always already inherent to the educative process. The philosopher’s
task is to render this logic or dynamic explicit and to identify its implications.
It is also to critique approaches to education that effectively undermine this
logic either by pursuing means that negate the practice’s own aims or by sub-
stituting extraneous ends, a common occurrence at present if it is not indeed
a universal phenomenon.
Like any social practice, education contains its own immanent conditions
and ends which can be undermined when pursued by improper means or
when conflicting aims supplant them. The temptation toward the latter is
great and certainly not limited to our own time and place. The classroom will
remain the playground of politicians and social engineers, religionists and
enthusiasts, social scientists and philosophers, sometimes for the better and
sometimes not. When they are for the better, such efforts recognize a kind of
integrity – an integration of principles – inherent to the learning process,
principles that must be identified and implemented if the practice is to
succeed. When for the worse, these efforts reduce education to a mere
means to an end, usually an end defined in terms of economics, politics, or
religion.
Whatever education is at the most fundamental level of analysis, it is not
merely a means to an end. While it has always been known that a good
education prepares one for a career and for later life in general – whether
directly or indirectly, by intention or by accident – its meaning is not limited
to this. In particular, it is not limited to economic utility. There is a higher
purpose that education serves, as Plato taught us to see even while mis-
describing this purpose or construing it in crude, metaphysical terms.
To understand the nature and purpose of education we must view it in the
larger context of human experience. The philosophical concept of experi-
ence provides the most appropriate point of view from which to interpret
our theme for the reason that the transition that education essentially is is a
transition in our experience of ourselves and our world. Beyond having
acquired a certain amount of information, the educated mind possesses a
capacity for experience that is richer and more expansive than its less
4 Introduction
figures and themes following his time and in some cases figures who belong
to a tradition that interested Dewey very little. This is the tradition, or tradi-
tions, of continental European philosophy that includes, among many other
figures, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, and John
Caputo, all of whom will be interlocutors as well in the study that follows. My
question is how well Dewey’s position stands up today, in view of what we may
consider to be developments in the field. Do Heidegger’s statements on the
nature of thinking, for instance, add anything of importance to Dewey’s view
or compel a re-examination? Does Gadamer’s philosophy of experience
advance beyond Dewey’s experimental model? How does a Deweyan view
of moral or political education look in light of Arendt’s theory of judgment
or Freire’s theory of dialogical education? Does Ricoeur’s narrative theory
of the self supplement a Deweyan view of literary education, and does
Foucault’s genealogical conception of history complement or undermine
Dewey’s notion of an historical education?
These are the questions that orient the following studies. In addressing
them I have endeavored to bring Dewey’s thought into contact with ideas not
radically unlike his own or, at any rate, that are sufficiently commensurable
with it to make productive dialogue possible. Conversation across philosoph-
ical traditions is always difficult but rarely impossible, and while it is clear that
Dewey was not well disposed to continental philosophy much after Hegel, or
especially knowledgeable of it, deep affinities do exist between Dewey and
several strains in the continental thought of the twentieth century. Some of
these affinities are traceable to his profound and lifelong indebtedness to
Hegel while other similarities will be due to factors less readily identifiable.
Dewey was a profoundly American philosopher, one for whom the works of
his European contemporaries for the most part held little or no interest, in
spite of his deeply phenomenological sensibility and the important similari-
ties between his work and much of what was happening in French and (espe-
cially) German philosophy during his lifetime. While in 1930 Dewey would
describe how his ‘acquaintance with Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my
thinking’, the same cannot be said of the continental thought of his day.3
Indeed, even his knowledge of such key figures as Nietzsche, Husserl, and
Heidegger was surprisingly scant, with no or very few references to their works
appearing in Dewey’s writings, and none demonstrating a proper under-
standing of their significance or affinity to his own thought.
My own views on education will emerge in the confrontations between
Dewey and the above-mentioned theorists. Part 1 looks at Dewey in connec-
tion with two of the most important figures in twentieth-century phenome-
nology and hermeneutics: Heidegger and Gadamer. After examining in
some detail Dewey’s conceptions of experience and thinking, I shall place
10 Introduction
Notes
1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
2. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper
and Row, 1968), 4.
3. Dewey, ‘From Absolutism to Experimentalism’ (1930). LW 5: 154.
PA RT 1
13
14 The Educative Process
important part of the current thinking that prevails among most theorists
and practitioners of education while the texts themselves are often forgot-
ten, caricatured, or misread. Conservative and other critics of progressive
education are often similarly inclined toward misinterpretation of Dewey in
particular, often faulting him for good reason or bad for what they consider
the failings of our educational institutions.1 While we continue to hear of the
enduring legacy of progressive education and the pre-eminent status of
Dewey in that movement, progressivism can also appear to be a merely
historical phenomenon which recent advances in educational research have
consigned to the past along with its conservative antithesis. A vital question
becomes whether the old dispute between progressives and conservatives has
lost its relevance in light of findings in the philosophical and especially the
scientific dimension of education. Philosophical debates often appear to
have been superseded by developments in learning theory and developmen-
tal psychology in particular, raising the hope in many minds that the essen-
tial business of education might finally transcend the contested realm of
politics and philosophy and be placed on a scientific foundation.
The prospect of education becoming a purely scientific, technical, or
otherwise non-philosophical field of research is one that should give us
pause. While the dichotomy of progressive or conservative education may
well need to be replaced it must first be worked through in dialectical
fashion. If this opposition is to be superseded, this will occur not on a scien-
tific or technical basis alone but on philosophical grounds. The ultimate
questions of education have always been and will remain philosophical,
despite the efforts of many to transform them into purely technical issues. In
one sense this old binary opposition is of merely historical interest as the
conversation moves on and different issues come to the fore, yet in a deeper
sense the dichotomy, or at least the distinction, remains very much with us.
New forms of educational conservatism and of what might still be character-
ized as progressivism, however loosely, have many defenders at the present
time both in theoretical discourse and at the policy level, obliging us to
revisit some of the questions that Dewey was engaged with a century ago,
albeit in altered form. As two commentators have recently pointed out, ‘It
might be argued that classical progressivist approaches and methods, at least
in some school systems, have become the new orthodoxy.’2 It is undoubtedly
not an orthodoxy that Dewey envisioned, but it retains at least a family
resemblance with his philosophy of education and with other classical
progressive views which claimed to be influenced by him.
The continuing relevance of this distinction is also apparent in recent
defenses of educational conservatism from such writers as R. S. Peters, Allan
Bloom, and E. D. Hirsch, the latter two of whose views I shall examine in this
chapter. The purchase that conservative views have gained, particularly
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 15
[Let us] get rid of the prejudicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as
distinct from degree) between the child’s experience and the various
forms of subject-matter that make up the course of study. From the side of
the child it is a question of seeing how his experience already contains
within itself elements – facts and truths – of just the same sort as those
entering into the formulated study; and what is of more importance, how
it contains within itself the attitudes, the motives and the interests which
have operated in developing and organizing the subject-matter to the
plane which it now occupies.7
There is always the danger in a new movement that in rejecting the aims
and methods of that which it would supplant, it may develop its principles
negatively rather than positively and constructively. Then it takes its clew
in practice from that which is rejected instead of from the constructive
development of its own philosophy.
that acquaintance with the past has little or no role to play in education.
Without pressing these defects to the point of exaggeration, they at least
illustrate what is meant by a theory and practice of education which
proceeds negatively or by reaction against what has been current in
education rather than by a positive and constructive development of
purposes, methods, and subject-matter on the foundation of a theory of
experience and its educational potentialities.9
about the ambiguity and difficulty of his texts, and perhaps for this reason
(or for reasons of their datedness or the fact that they may not be required
reading in educational faculties and teaching colleges) do not read them. Yet
the idea persists that Dewey has had an all-pervasive influence on both the
theory and practice of education. One recent and rather vociferous critic,
for example, alleges that Dewey has had a disastrous effect on American
education in particular while also noting (apparently without noticing the
contradiction) that ‘[i]t is impossible to determine exactly how much influ-
ence Dewey has had on American education’. The same critic writes:
Unfortunately, despite his iconic status, Dewey is rarely read and his work
is poorly understood in public schools and in colleges of education.
Future teachers often learn a little bit ‘about’ Dewey the man and
educator, but they are never given the opportunity to assess critically the
Deweyan ideas that underlie their classes and permeate their professional
organizations.11
Even the assertion that ‘Deweyan ideas’ in some form or other have had a
profound impact on education is difficult to assess precisely for the reason
that the texts themselves are seldom read by educators and are badly carica-
tured. Speaking of Dewey’s early influence, Sidney Hook noted in 1939 that
influence that bears less and less resemblance to Dewey’s views. While still
showing signs of continuity with progressivism, the more recent trend has
taken a decided turn toward the scientific, the technical, and the managerial.
The matter of how students learn – different categories of students at differ-
ent stages of development – has become the dominant issue in the discourse
of education. Dewey as well posed the general question of ‘how we think’
(not least in his 1910 book of that title, published again in revised form in
1933), yet while his approach to this question can be best described as
phenomenological, the current thinking is framed strictly within a vocabu-
lary of empirical and developmental psychology, a non-phenomenological
and ostensibly apolitical methodology. Education, according to this new
orthodoxy, is essentially a scientific matter and its central question is one of
technique: how (not why or whether) to bring about certain predetermined
educational ‘outcomes’. These outcomes are often described in vaguely pro-
gressive terms, to be sure. The language of individual growth and autonomy,
of creativity and critical thinking, now enjoys very broad appeal and is
coupled with a more political terminology of empowerment and democratic
equality. To all appearances the spirit of progressive education lives on, yet
on closer inspection it appears closer to the truth to say that certain Deweyan
themes have been thoroughly transformed and perhaps co-opted to lend
legitimacy to a philosophy that Dewey would have rejected.
The broad outlines of this trend are as follows. It includes a decided
emphasis on technology, particularly the use of computers in an ever more
pervasive way, an exhortation toward managerial efficiency and cost-
effectiveness, the concept of the student as customer and the educator as
resource, service provider, or facilitator of a kind, student-centeredness, an
emphasis on ‘learning outcomes’ conceived as tangible and measurable
results of one kind or another, general skills of problem-solving and critical
thinking, the acquisition of useful information, particularly in the areas of
mathematics and science, cognitive and psycho-social development, the
various and growing number of learning styles, individual autonomy, educa-
tion as a commodity, and so on. Increasingly it is the language not only of
science and technology but of the marketplace that dominates the discourse
of education (I would not say the philosophy of education in view of the res-
olutely un- or indeed antiphilosophical nature of so much of this discussion).
A general mindset of technology and of scientific and economic rationality
is now so entrenched, and its basic orientation so contrary to Dewey’s stance,
that its connection with progressive education is increasingly difficult to see.
Perhaps the most accurate description of the current thinking in educa-
tion remains one put forward in 1979 by Jean-François Lyotard in his well-
known book The Postmodern Condition, in which he pronounced a diagnosis
of the state of education, research, and knowledge in general in the second
22 The Educative Process
Two other theorists writing in the same volume similarly lament this new
‘rhetoric of the marketplace’:
outcome or a science but a life process that has no end beyond itself.
Educational institutions no more approximate corporations than students
are human capital in the making or laboratory rats in a behaviorist’s maze.
Their purpose far exceeds instilling virtues of adaptation and efficiency,
but includes such economically useless qualities as inquisitiveness, wonder,
originality, and self-understanding. There is still a place for such values in a
scientific age, and if these and similar intellectual virtues are being de-
emphasized and consequently unlearned in the rage to make it scientific,
then it is not only our educational institutions that are in trouble. What
students must ultimately learn is the art of thinking, yet this is precisely what
defies measurable outcomes, standardization, and formal calculation. While
I shall not urge that the vocabulary of performativity and educational science
be rejected in its entirety – a proposition that is surely absurd – my focus in
this study will be the limits of this vocabulary and its subordinate place within
a roughly Deweyan philosophy of education.
What must not be lost sight of, as Dewey himself never did, are the limits
of science. There is no doubt that knowledge derived from psychology, cog-
nitive science, sociology, and other branches of social science have profitably
informed our understanding of the educative process, particularly regarding
issues of means: how students of different descriptions and at different
maturational levels successfully integrate new knowledge into an established
conceptual framework and how our pedagogical practices may be adjusted
in this light. Enormous quantities of empirical study have devoted them-
selves to this purpose for some decades now; however what too much of this
research overlooks is that the question of how learning takes place is not only
an empirical matter but a properly philosophical one, and that as a philo-
sophical question it calls upon the resources of phenomenology, hermeneu-
tics, and perhaps epistemology. This again is an issue of which Dewey was well
aware and that educational researchers today often are not. Furthermore,
empirical questions regarding the means, or the how, of education remain
subordinate to the matter of its ends, or its why. Here again we are faced with
a philosophical question for which science will not help us, as Dewey also
knew. Empirical investigation will never disclose what the ultimate aims of
education are, or what the whole enterprise is for. It cannot account for
which ‘learning outcomes’ we ought to seek and why, which subject matters
are of importance and why, or any other question pertaining to ends. Like
politics, education is a matter about which we may certainly ask scientific
questions, but a science itself it is not. Treating it as one narrows rather than
deepens our understanding of it and causes us to overlook the often tenuous
connection between empirical – particularly psychological – research and
the actual practices of teaching and learning. Inferences drawn from the
realm of empirical study to what actually takes place in classrooms are often
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 27
less than obvious, and educators obliged to bridge these worlds are often and
quite understandably at a loss as to how to do this. The confusion itself is
instructive, I would suggest, and affects very little whether education
succeeds or fails. Educational success depends to a great extent on the intan-
gibles and unquantifiables of the classroom, precisely on that which no
method can teach. There is no technique for instilling a fascination with
history, a capacity for inventive interpretation, or a sense of justice.
It is on this last point that Lyotard placed his emphasis. The heart and soul
of education, on his account, is the students’ own capacity for novelty in fash-
ioning ideas and in questioning received bodies of knowledge. Research and
education are likewise centered on dissension rather than consensus.
Success occurs when we are able to invent novel moves within settled
language games or, better still, to invent new language games and thus
‘disturb the order of “reason”’.18 The truest indicator of educational success
is that for which there is no science and no method: the power of the imag-
ination to destabilize what presently passes for knowledge and to invent new
ways of seeing the world. The conditions that would make this possible, of
course, are not present when imperatives of scientificity and performativity
gain a dominant position, effectively creating a world that is ever more an
object of calculation and administration and of means over ends.
Corporate scientism has little use for the intangibles of education or for
that which cannot be brought within an ethos of scientific and economic
rationality. The arts and humanities in particular are regularly, and quite
inevitably, deemed unnecessary luxuries in comparison with the sciences and
mathematics and the utilitarian benefits that these disciplines provide.
Those champions of the arts and humanities who are obligated to plead
their case within a vocabulary that is foreign, if not antithetical, to them are
engaged in a losing cause indeed. No cost–benefit analysis redeems the study
of music or philosophy. The problem here is not that we are unable to
provide such an accounting – without resorting to clever but inauthentic
marketing – but that we are required to do so.
presently see and would never lead him to overlook the limits of scientific
knowledge or to regard education itself as a science. Fundamentally, Dewey’s
project was never to issue a prescription proclaiming under the banner of
science what education should be but to describe what it is. It is, he argued,
a process that is continuous with human experience more generally, not
something that can be sharply distinguished from the ordinary life of
students and not merely a means to an end of whatever kind. The educative
process has ends internal to itself, and it is these ends that provide the whole
business of teaching and learning with their basic orientation. This idea has
been lost sight of by progressives and positivists alike. If there are grounds in
Dewey’s philosophy, as there undoubtedly are, on which to critique the cor-
porate scientism of the present, there are other, more conservative, grounds
on which to do so as well. Surprisingly perhaps, some of these arguments
Dewey himself advanced, yet their contemporary proponents most often call
not for a critical appropriation of Dewey’s thought but for an unDeweyan
return of sorts to traditional education.
Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch are particularly interesting cases in point.
Their views warrant attention here for reasons of both the considerable influ-
ence they have had since the nearly simultaneous publication in 1987 of
Bloom’s bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind and Hirsch’s bestseller,
Cultural Literacy, as well as the evidence they provide of the continuing
relevance of the progressive/conservative distinction and the inherent
merits of at least some of their arguments. Bloom’s version of educational
conservatism begins with a broad-ranging critique of education in American
universities or of particular trends within them, the primary sources of
which, Bloom asserts, are the thought not of Dewey or Kilpatrick but of
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.20 While I cannot do justice here
to the scope of Bloom’s harsh and wide-ranging critique, the main thrust of
it concerns the lack of knowledge of and reverence for the canon which has
become commonplace among the university students of today – or of 1987,
although this has hardly changed in more recent years. As Bloom writes,
‘Today’s select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from
the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their pre-
decessors look like prodigies of culture.’ Speaking of the students whom
Bloom taught during the latter part of his career in comparison with those
he encountered at the beginning, he laments:
The loss of the books [the great canonical texts of the Western tradition]
has made them narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is
most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness
that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what
is and despairing of ever escaping from it. The longing for the beyond has
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 29
The kind of ignorance about which Bloom worries is far less a lack of practi-
cal, informational knowledge which students of prior generations possessed
in greater quantity but a lack of acquaintance with and deep appreciation for
the great works of literature, art, philosophy, and so on which, for Bloom, still
constitutes the heart and soul of education. The humanities in particular have
fallen into disarray since ‘[w]ith the “information explosion”, tradition has
become superfluous’. Rather than being a source of edification or inspira-
tion, tradition has become merely the dead weight of the past if not an
oppressive force or a cause of boredom. No longer do students believe that
the canon is where they may expect to find truths more profound than in
popular culture or the mass media. As reverence for the canon erodes, so too
do students’ capacities for depth of feeling and aesthetic appreciation, for
separating what is important from what is trivial, and for gravity or seriousness
of purpose. The love of reading and expectation of personal improvement
through reading the classics are disappearing and being replaced by more
immediate forms of entertainment. Education and students’ characters them-
selves have become shallow and unimaginative as the more ultimate matters
of life disappear from view and as utilitarian values and ‘careerism [become]
the centerpiece of the university’.22 Books and ideas no longer change the
lives of the young but, when they are attended to at all, provide a pleasing
diversion from the business of acquiring professional credentials.
The very raison d’être of the university is in question, Bloom maintains,
when students are no longer expected to know the tradition in which they
stand and to gain a proper appreciation of its canonical texts. Students who
do not read fail to understand themselves and become more alike in their
thinking and actions due to a lack of awareness that what is might be other-
wise. As Bloom expresses this rather important point, ‘the failure to read
good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal
tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is’.23 It is literature in
particular that educates the imagination and instills both the means and the
desire to understand human existence differently. It is, then, no lack of
funding or underattention to the basics that is the source of educational
failure but a forgetfulness of the university’s proper mission and the conse-
quent neglect of the arts and humanities.
30 The Educative Process
If this is the cause of what ails the contemporary university, then the
remedy is not far to seek:
Of course, the only serious solution is the one that is almost universally
rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education
means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, just reading
them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of
approaching them – not forcing them into categories we make up, not
treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their
authors wished them to be read.
Beyond Bloom’s call for a return to the canon he offers little or nothing by
way of recommendations for educational reform. As he puts it, ‘One cannot
and should not hope for a general reform. The hope is that the embers do
not die out.’24 One keeps tradition alive as it were by placing it carefully
under glass and urging students to study its features, to transport themselves
into the past without any apparent concern for transforming the present and
without any genuine critique. This in a phrase is the nature and goal of edu-
cational conservatism: the point is to conserve. It is also to encounter texts
in the manner in which their authors would have wished: with an attitude of
receptivity and indeed reverence. The point is not to take issue with the texts
or with tradition itself but rather to preserve it in essentially unaltered form.
Bloom’s traditionalism, like all forms of this doctrine, represents a mis-
understanding of the very nature of tradition and the way in which it repro-
duces itself. When culture or tradition is a living phenomenon rather than
merely the dead weight of the past, which Bloom fears it has become in the
hands of today’s students, it is appropriated selectively, critically, and with an
eye to how it may in one way or another serve the needs of the present. We
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 31
become slaves to the past when we encounter it in the reverential and passive
manner that Bloom recommends. While we may have a certain sympathy –
indeed a great deal – for his lament for the erosion of the canon, the failure
to instill in students a passion for reading, and the narrowing of perspective
and slackening of thought that this causes, the remedy does not lie in an
uncritical conservatism. Nor does the respect for tradition entail any manner
of traditionalism, if by this term we mean the insistence on preserving the
past in unaltered form. What distinguishes a living from a moribund tradi-
tion is precisely that the former is appropriated in the way in which one joins
a conversation that began long ago: by listening and learning, to be sure, but
equally, and perhaps more essentially, by participating in it. To participate in
tradition, or to take it up authentically, always means to carry it forward, to
apply it to present circumstances, and more than occasionally to critique and
transform it, sometimes radically. Where tradition is not a source of dogma-
tism and intellectual conformity it is a conversation which students and all
members of a culture are called upon to take up and creatively transform.
Keeping tradition alive therefore does not consist in merely preserving the
embers or in any museum tour through the canon. It amounts not to a
simple repetition of the past but to a task of critical appropriation, and it is
the critical dimension that traditionalists like Bloom either underemphasize,
ignore, or deny. The slackness and narrowing of intellect about which he
rightfully worries is not remedied by having students adopt quite as passive
and unresisting a stance toward tradition as Bloom recommends. If he is
correct in his view that the ‘most fatal tendency’ to which students can
succumb is ‘the belief that the here and now is all there is’, it is incorrect to
assert that the only or best alternative to the present is the past. Dissolving
the common assumption that how matters currently stand is either
axiomatic, natural, or ahistorically given is indeed fundamental to education
and to wisdom itself. (This is not, incidentally, an original insight of Bloom’s,
and was a major theme in the writings of both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the
ostensible sources of the ills Bloom describes.) What is, will not always be,
nor has it always been so; there are alternatives to the present arrangement
of things, whether we are speaking of social institutions, worldviews, or what
have you. When this lesson is not imparted, one goes through life overly con-
tented with what is and unable to imagine that things could be otherwise.
Undoubtedly the commonness of this phenomenon represents an important
educational failure, however it is eminently doubtful both that there was a
time in the past (Bloom’s youth perhaps) when this failure or this assump-
tion was less prevalent and that the remedy to it lies in a traditionalism that
is equally dogmatic.
Bloom’s conservatism should not be dismissed outright, as many have
done (understandably, given the harsh and often cantankerous tone of his
32 The Educative Process
Once the general knowledge has been acquired, the skill follows. General
programs contrived to teach general skills are ineffective. AI research
shows that experts perform better than novices not because they have
more powerful and better oiled intellectual machinery but because they
have more relevant and quickly available information. What distinguishes
good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of diverse,
task-specific information.27
34 The Educative Process
Hirsch is advancing three claims in this passage and it is important that they
be distinguished: the first concerns the futility of teaching general thinking
skills in a curricular vacuum; second, possessing information in large quan-
tities is a necessary condition of higher-order thinking; and third, it is a
sufficient condition as well. It is the third claim that is especially important,
and also peculiar when we consider that its author is not himself a cognitive
psychologist or researcher in artificial intelligence but a professor of English
literature – a field in which skilled readers are customarily distinguished
from unskilled ones on grounds that far exceed the quantity of factual infor-
mation at their disposal (something that a detailed plot summary could
provide), and include capacities of aesthetic appreciation, interpretation,
and critical discernment, the ability to articulate questions and to see what is
questionable, to be appropriately receptive or resistant to the message of a
text depending on what emerges in the reading of it, to negotiate one’s way
about the hermeneutic circle, to search for coherence, detect tensions and
contradictions, and so on. I shall return to this later.
Essential, Hirsch also maintains, to the rehabilitation of traditional
education is not only the return to traditional pedagogical techniques but a
standardized curriculum, standardized testing, and a renewed accent on par-
ticular ethical and religious values, specifically those of the Judeo-Christian
tradition. Shifting with perfect equanimity from the language of science to
the language of religious politics, Hirsch defends the notion of an ‘American
civil religion’ that was bequeathed by the founders and that remains foun-
dational to American society. Against ‘secularist-Americans’ – who, Hirsch
tells us, are ‘just another species of hyphenated Americans’ – he insists on
returning to a religious ethics in the classroom at both elementary and
advanced levels.28 ‘Consensus values’ such as Christian altruism, the golden
rule, civic duty, patriotism, and loyalty, along with a reverence for national
symbols and belief in God, are to be directly instilled by educators in the
minds of the young.29
This form of conservatism spells trouble for plurality and indeed for intel-
lectual freedom itself. Despite occasional protestations to the contrary, the
concept of education that Hirsch espouses directly entails both cultural and
intellectual homogeneity. Evidence of this is plentiful throughout Hirsch’s
educational writings. In addition to the ‘consensus values’ that purportedly
constitute the ‘American civil religion’, Hirsch speaks in highly dismissive
terms of bilingualism and multiculturalism in the schools on the grounds
of the ‘cultural fragmentation, civil antagonism, illiteracy, and economic-
technological ineffectualness’ that such policies cause both in parts of the
United States and in nations such as Canada and Belgium in which they are
applied on a larger scale. The latter two nations are singled out in particular
as examples that, as he puts it, ‘are not encouraging’. Cultural monoliteracy
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 35
The merit of Whitehead’s remarks will be evident to any who attend closely
to the practices of teaching and learning as they are actually experienced.
The process succeeds, we say, not when a prepackaged collection of data is
stored away in the inner recesses of a student’s mental warehouse, where it
is placed neatly on a shelf and preserved for future use, but when a degree
of insight or self-understanding is gained by means of the subject matter that
is appropriated. Such appropriation is no merely superficial absorption of
information but a more profound process in which an active intellect in-
tegrates deeply and critically transforms a given subject matter in a way that
is consistent with any learning experience undergone in the course of
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 37
the insistence that those who are capable of it are also well informed, an
observation that is true but uninformative. Learning to think, however this is
accomplished, is far more complex a matter than Hirsch’s account allows.
One point, however, on which educational conservatives do not err is
their worry regarding the kind and amount of knowledge that students are
currently gaining. Whether it be higher capacities of reflection and inven-
tiveness that we are speaking of, Hirsch’s informational knowledge, or
Bloom’s beloved canon, students who pass successfully through the various
stages of education today are not, let us say, and without putting too fine a
point on it, overburdened with knowledge. Educators are well aware of what
their students know and care about and what they do not know and care
about, and while the matter may be less dire than some conservatives believe,
nor is it a cause for celebration that universities are now obliged to provide
remedial education in writing or mathematics, that students’ knowledge of
language and grammar is often lamentable, and that the love of reading or
of knowledge as an end in itself has seen better days. Conservatives are right
to worry about this, but tempting as it may be to hark back to a time in the
past when students ostensibly knew more, in whatever sense of this phrase
that one prefers, such a stance is nostalgic and foolish. It is no simple return
to tradition that is called for, or to progressivism for that matter, but a new
thinking that gets us beyond the dichotomies that Dewey was already urging
us to reject a century ago and that continue to orient so much of the dis-
course of education. Hackneyed oppositions of student-centered or curricu-
lum-centered education, critical thinking or factual knowledge, active or
passive learning, and so on must be overcome, and in a fashion more
convincing than what I have called corporate scientism has managed. It
should be obvious, for instance, that there is no genuine dichotomy between
the possession of informational knowledge – which conservatives like Hirsch
dwell upon to the point of excluding other, equally important educational
aims – and the development of critical thinking skills – which progressives
have sometimes overemphasized, misunderstood, or presumed can be
imparted apart from subject matter. One does not think critically in a
curricular vacuum, nor does one appropriate a heritage by accepting it as an
unquestionable given.
Understanding education requires that we orient the discussion no longer
around oppositions that a growing number of theorists are correctly urging
us to abandon, and that we attend less to theoretical -isms that mistake a part
of the educative process for the whole, and focus our attention instead on
that process itself and the conditions that make it possible. Learning experi-
ences that happen in institutions are not different in kind from learning
experiences that happen in ordinary life. We would do well, then, to ask what
the nature and conditions of such experience are.
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 39
and it was only when this seemingly obvious proposition was overlooked by
progressive educators that he was compelled to point this out explicitly. Yet
point it out he did, and in a way that left no doubt of his ambivalence for the
movement he had ostensibly inspired.
If it is a common mistake to identify Dewey as the originator of the
dichotomies that continue to orient much educational theory as well as the
principal cause of progressivism’s more unfortunate consequences – includ-
ing especially the sacrifice of a rigorous curriculum to the supposed condi-
tions of students’ well-being – it remains that much of progressive education
did arise directly or indirectly from Dewey’s writings, including especially its
critique of traditional, schoolmasterish pedagogy. This critique, as applicable
to contemporary as to older forms of conservatism, maintains that while it is
among the principal aims of education to transmit traditional subject
matters, it is essential that this be carried out in the spirit of research and
critical inquiry rather than simply ingested for the purpose of conservation.
Dewey’s reasons for rejecting the notion of education as either a simple
repetition of the past or a preparation for later life – or, as for Hirsch, a com-
bination of the two – were at once political and philosophical. While the
political objection concerned the kinds of democratic citizens which the
older education was designed to produce, the philosophical objection
concerned the nature of knowledge and experience.
It is the nature of human knowledge, Dewey the pragmatic experimental-
ist maintained, not simply to accommodate the present to the past but to
appropriate traditional ideas in the spirit of intelligent criticism and with an
eye to their enhancement and transformation. Received knowledge is not
merely bestowed on groups of students as a fait accompli but taken up into an
inquiry which learns about and from the past while identifying the errors
that have also been handed down in tradition. As Dewey expressed it,
A true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon
a process of action from without. The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a
stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but is an externally dictated
order to do such and such things. Instead of connecting directly with
present activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it is to
be reached. Instead of suggesting a freer and better balanced activity, it is
a limit set to activity. In education, the currency of these externally
imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion of
preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of both
teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.37
Dewey would often express this view in his educational writings.38 The
learning process must receive its basic orientation from knowledge itself and
the manner in which it is acquired in human experience. Educational aims
are ‘an outgrowth of existing conditions’ and are ‘based upon a considera-
tion of what is already going on’, where ‘what is already going on’ is everyday
experience and the search for understanding.39 Herein lies the principal
failing of traditional (also some less traditional) education and the one from
which many others stem: in articulating educational aims in the abstract
(preparation for later life, the requirements of economic prosperity, per-
formativity) and importing these into the learning process as an external
imposition, the process itself is distorted by extraneous values inflexibly held
and inserted into a practice that by its own constitution expressly forbids
42 The Educative Process
that leads us from an existing interest toward a more expansive set of these,
interests that are more abstract and theoretical than the original curiosity. A
common, and potentially misleading, way of stating this is that the curricu-
lum must ‘be relevant’ or ‘engage students’ interests’ in a sense that is
contrasted with the traditional separation of students’ experiences inside
and outside the classroom. This does not mean that educators should
indulge whatever interests students happen to have or, what is worse, restrict
their experience to the merely enjoyable. Education makes demands on
us, just as human experience in general does, and requires all who take it
seriously to engage in a process that is taxing, rigorous, and seldom enter-
taining.
While not always pleasurable, education as Dewey described it is nonethe-
less an end in itself in the sense that its aims are immanent to a learning
process that is itself continuous with the broader course of human experi-
ence. If its beneficiaries are not mere cogs in the economic machinery but
beings who, as Aristotle told us, ‘by nature desire to know’ then even as edu-
cation serves to prepare students to earn a livelihood it always aims beyond
this to instill higher capacities of thought, including especially the capacity
for learning itself. As Dewey remarked,
The best thing that can be said about any special process of education,
like that of the formal school period, is that it renders its subject capable
of further education: more sensitive to conditions of growth and more
able to take advantage of them. Acquisition of skill, possession of know-
ledge, attainment of culture are not ends: they are marks of growth and
means to its continuing.42
universal. This cultivation of the self is its own end and involves the simulta-
neous formation of an object – a work – and oneself. As Gadamer wrote,
In forming the object – that is, in being selflessly active and concerned
with a universal – working consciousness raises itself above the immediacy
of its existence to universality; or, as Hegel puts it, by forming the thing it
forms itself. What he means is that in inquiring a ‘capacity’, a skill, man
gains the sense of himself.
The work of education forms and transforms the self, calls it into question
and requires a ‘distancing from the immediacy of desire, of personal need
and private interest, and the exacting demand of a universal’.46 In similar
terms, Dewey would speak of the formation of the individual student as a
competent citizen of a democracy, one with cultivated faculties and sympa-
thies which incline the individual toward constructive forms of social engage-
ment. The transition from childhood to maturity expressed in the notion of
Bildung is at once a matter of individual formation and acculturation; one
gains a sense of oneself in forms of social participation, by risking oneself
and one’s judgments in the conversation that one’s culture essentially is.
Education requires an openness to what is other and a dialectical movement
back and forth between a venturing beyond oneself into the unfamiliar and
having one’s point of view and one’s being transformed in the process. Here
at last we get to the heart of the matter: education fundamentally is an
unending process of fashioning and refashioning the self by rising to the
universal, as Hegel would say. In Deweyan terms it is the cultivation of habits
and capacities which make us competent democratic citizens and fully
rational beings. While education inevitably informs students and prepares
them to take their place in the workforce, such aims are subordinate to the
formation of the self as a reflective agent. In only the loosest sense of the
term may we speak of education as a science; while it is informed by various
kinds of empirical inquiry, education itself is an art by virtue of that with
which it is ultimately concerned: human understanding and the formation
of persons as cultural participants. The model for this art remains Socrates
engaged in conversation with the citizens of Athens, an informal and undog-
matic mode of inquiry in which all are participants and no one, including
the educator, is above the fray of dialogue. From the educator this art
requires the skilful guidance of inquiry from a given set of interests toward a
broader horizon, a guidance that draws upon a variety of methods – from
direct instruction and lecturing to informal discussion, posing questions,
hazarding opinions, interpreting texts, and provoking thought in any way
one is able. The common tendency in educational research to treat this
practice as an application of empirically discoverable laws of learning is
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 47
scientistic idolatry in its most crude form, as William James already noted in
his Talks to Teachers on Psychology of 1899:
. . . you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology,
being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can
deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for
immediate classroom use. Psychology is a science and teaching is an art;
and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An interme-
diary inventive mind must make the application by using its originality.47
We see, also, the loss of the capacity for meditation, for solitude, for sus-
tained thinking that can concentrate only on one thing at a time, not on
an infinite number. Are the pessimists right in claiming that the actual
rule of mediocrity calls for drill in place of a free intellectual life, that it
requires existence to be divided into an empty bustle of work and no less
empty pleasures? Or is it possible to give another chance to a free life –
one that would be spiritually intensive rather than just scholastically exten-
sive?48
Notes
1. A few unfortunate examples of this in the contemporary literature are Henry
Edmondson’s John Dewey and the Decline of American Education (Wilmington: ISI Books,
2006), Kieran Egan’s Getting It Wrong From the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance
from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2002), and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New
York: Vintage, 1988) and The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (New York:
Doubleday, 1996).
2. John Darling and Sven Erik Nordenbo, ‘Progressivism’ in The Blackwell Guide to the Phi-
losophy of Education, eds N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith and P. Standish (Malden: Black-
well, 2003), 288. The same authors also raise ‘the delicate question of whether such
approaches and methods still merit the term “progressivism”’ (Ibid., 288).
50 The Educative Process
3. David Carr, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of
Education and Teaching (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003), 215–16, 214.
4. See for instance Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 4; Egan,
Getting It Wrong From the Beginning, 5; Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 3; and Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, 8, 9.
5. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 56.
6. Shaun Gallagher, Hermeneutics and Education (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1992), 185.
7. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (1903). MW 2: 277–8.
8. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 504–5.
9. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 9.
10. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (1903). MW 2: 280–1.
11. Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 110, 4.
12. Sidney Hook, John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995),
177.
13. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
51, 4.
14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied
Hermeneutics, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss, eds Dieter Misgeld and
Graeme Nicholson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 165.
15. Derek Briton observes regarding adult education in particular: ‘The commonsense
assumption that the modern practice of adult education is a disinterested, scientific
endeavor that need not, indeed, should not concern itself with moral and political
questions has become all but impossible to question because the field’s normative
base can no longer be addressed within its narrowly defined, depoliticized, dehistori-
cized, technicist, professional discourse.’ Derek Briton, The Modern Practice of Adult
Education: A Postmodern Critique (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 9.
16. N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith and P. Standish, ‘Introduction’ to The Blackwell Guide
to the Philosophy of Education, 8.
17. David Bridges and Ruth Jonathon, ‘Education and the Market’ in The Blackwell Guide
to the Philosophy of Education, 29.
18. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 61.
19. The mistaken but still common reading of Dewey as a positivist of sorts is convincingly
critiqued by James Scott Johnston in his excellent study, Inquiry and Education: John
Dewey and the Quest for Democracy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
20. As Bloom puts it, ‘Our stars are singing a song they do not understand, translated
from a German original and having a huge popular success with unknown but wide-
ranging consequences, as something of the original message touches something in
American souls. But behind it all, the master lyricists are Nietzsche and Heidegger.’
Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 152. Careful readers of Nietzsche and
Heidegger – which Bloom clearly is not – will appreciate just how preposterous this
claim is.
21. Ibid., 51, 61.
22. Ibid., 58, 340.
23. Ibid., 64.
24. Ibid., 374, 380.
25. Hirsch, The Schools We Need, 19.
26. Ibid., 176.
27. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, xv–xvi, 61.
28. Ibid., 99.
Beyond Progressivism and Conservatism 51
52
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 53
Upon the whole, I believe that the crying evil in instruction today is that
the subject-matter of the curriculum, both as a whole and in its various
stages, is selected and determined on the objective or logical basis instead
of upon the psychological. The humble pedagogue stands with his mouth
and his hands wide open, waiting to receive from the abstract scientific
writers the complete system which the latter, after centuries of experience
and toilsome reflection, have elaborated. Receiving in this trustful way the
ready-made ‘subject’, he proceeds to hand it over in an equally ready-
made way to the pupil. The intervening medium of communication is
simply certain external attachments in the way of devices and tricks called
‘method’, and certain sugar-coatings in the way of extrinsic inducements
termed ‘arousing of interest’.3
Dewey never tired of criticizing, often in the harshest terms, the conservative
approaches that were the norm in his day and which he himself endured as
a youth in the public school system of Vermont, an educational system likely
no worse than the norm of that time but nonetheless lamentable. To appre-
ciate Dewey’s critique here, it is necessary to understand first the manner in
which he typically engaged in criticism of views that he rejected. Unlike so
many philosophers of his time and our own, Dewey was an uncommonly
54 The Educative Process
effort and interest, imposition from on high and expression from experi-
ence, preparation for the future and present life, and so on, in each case
replacing the former with the latter. Dewey would not follow them in this –
more accurately, he would rebuke them for not following him – insisting
instead that it is the dichotomy of progressivism and conservatism itself that
must be rejected in favor of a more nuanced position whose point of depar-
ture is the students’ experience but that endeavors to develop this in a direc-
tion and manner that is determined by the logic of experience itself.
To accomplish this, Dewey would insist that educators seek not merely to
‘hammer in’ or ‘plaster on’ the curriculum into students’ minds by the
traditional pedagogical means of memorization, drill, recitation, and so on,
but to create an environment of a kind that is instrumental in ‘calling out
certain responses’. If we think of education on the model of organic growth
and of life itself, it becomes ‘a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process’,
all of which concepts represent ‘conditions of growth’.9 Supplying these con-
ditions expresses a conception of education as in a sense intermediate
between the progressive idea of ‘development from within’ and the conser-
vative ‘formation from without’, although as with so many issues Dewey
remained closer to the former.10 One of the criticisms Dewey would most
often level against traditional education precisely concerns the environment
in which it occurs – typically one that stifles intellectual growth rather than
promotes it. An educational environment is properly regulated with a view to
its effects on such development and is produced by creating ‘experienced
situations’ that ‘call out thinking’ or spontaneously elicit reflection ‘in the
way in which . . . out-of-school situations do’. Thinking, if it occurs at all in
academic settings, does so when certain conditions are in place; when they
are not, thought typically stops in its tracks, if it arises at all. If it is charac-
teristic of thinking in general that it ‘arises out of a directly experienced
situation’ rather than out of an entirely predigested curriculum, or perhaps
‘out of nothing’, it becomes the business of the educator to provide and draw
upon experienced situations, directing them in the course of the learning
process along particular lines.11
Dewey’s accent on experience was not intended, as so many of his critics
and even his supporters often took him to mean, to devalue the curriculum
or knowledge itself but to insist on its connection with the experiential.
When this connection is not apparent, as so often it is not, the consequence
is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake but its veritable opposite: the
unmotivated mind confronting information ‘simply as information to be
retained for its own sake’, knowledge that ‘tends to stratify over vital experi-
ence’ rather than shed meaning on it.12 This motivation deficit has long been
one of the chief ills of education at all levels, yet rather than view this in the
traditional way as a sign of intellectual laziness on the part of the young,
56 The Educative Process
Dewey was hardly the first to note the natural inclination of the mind to seek
knowledge. Aristotle, in one of the most frequently cited remarks in the
history of Western thought, opened the Metaphysics with the observation that
‘All men by nature desire to know’, an observation with which few would
disagree, yet as every educator knows, it is a desire that can become remark-
ably attenuated in academic settings.15 Why is it, Dewey asked, that the im-
perative to understand that is so pronounced and ubiquitous in ordinary
experience is so often replaced with indifference in the classroom? His
answer was that students in traditional institutions are presented with infor-
mation in ways so removed from ordinary life that students begin to perceive
the world of knowledge as an altogether remote and ‘strange world’ that
‘overlies’ rather than connects with ‘the world of personal acquaintance’.
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 57
The sole problem of the student is to learn, for school purposes, for
purposes of recitations and promotions, the constituent parts of this
strange world. Probably the most conspicuous connotation of the word
knowledge for most persons to-day is just the body of facts and truths
ascertained by others; the material found in the rows and rows of atlases,
cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel, scientific treatises, on
the shelves of libraries.16
The traditional reply to this is that the purpose of education can be confi-
dently expected to become apparent to students later in life and consists
essentially in preparing them for that life, a matter that the immature mind
cannot be expected to comprehend. Dewey countered that while the notion
of education as a preparation for the future is not wholly without merit, it
faces insurmountable difficulties, beginning with the fact that the discon-
nection between the subject matter of education and present life under-
mines the motivation to learn, distorts students’ conception of knowledge,
and fosters attitudes of intellectual docility and conventionality. Additionally,
the doctrine of preparation undermines itself by overlooking the very factors
that make a genuine preparation for the future possible. As he argued, ‘only
by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experi-
ence are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future’.17 Supplying
students with knowledge that in the educator’s estimation they will some day
need creates a sizeable problem regarding retention, as is apparent when we
reflect on our own years of schooling and how much of the information
presented to us we have managed to retain.18 When we compare this with the
capacity to absorb and retain information that vitally connects with students’
experience, the contrast is remarkable. It is commonplace for a child or
young adult to possess little capacity to retain their lessons in mathematics or
literature while having an encyclopedic knowledge of sports or music that
can remain with them for decades.19 It is nothing inherent to sports, music,
or the youthful mind that explains this contrast but the connection of the
former to the lived experience of the young. When educators are able to
draw genuinely upon students’ experience outside the classroom the situa-
tion is dramatically different. Unless we wish to assert that students do not
learn outside of institutions, or that what they learn there does not constitute
education, we must explain why it so often happens that one and the same
mind can be lackluster and indifferent to learning in an academic setting yet
58 The Educative Process
form of British idealism indebted in the main to Hegel and T. H. Green (an
allegiance that Dewey never abandoned entirely, or, at any rate, not to
Hegel24) and toward a Jamesian psychology and ‘radical empiricism’
modeled rather directly on biology. Where earlier epistemologies had failed,
radical empiricists now maintained, is in the basic notion of mind as con-
fronting the world from an external perspective, as an essentially worldless
subjectivity standing to the ‘external world’ as if on one side of an ontologi-
cal abyss, in the world in one manner or another but not of it. The episte-
mological problematic of knowing the world meant escaping by some
reliable method the inner confines of subjectivity and ascertaining whether
objects in the world resemble in their true being the ideas of them that are
immediately before the mind. The empiricism that James and Dewey put
forward rejects this model in its entirety and replaces it with a naturalistic
and biological model of experience. Human experience is fundamentally
bound up with, is indeed ultimately inseparable from, the world – an idea
that the phenomenological movement, following Edmund Husserl, would
speak of as the intentionality of consciousness. Conscious experience, radical
empiricism and phenomenology likewise maintained, has an intentional
structure and is always already directed toward, bound up with, and ulti-
mately inseparable from its object. The subject–object dichotomy represents
a distortion of how we experience both objects in the natural world and
social phenomena belonging to what Husserl would now call the lifeworld.
Experience does not occur in a vacuum, these thinkers now asserted and
elaborated in vocabularies rather different both from each other and from
the earlier epistemologies of empiricism, rationalism, and idealism. While it
is highly regrettable that radical empiricism and phenomenology would
develop as entirely separate traditions of thought, barely on speaking terms
with each other, with phenomenology emerging in Germany and France and
radical empiricism remaining an American phenomenon, the basic premises
they share include a general skepticism of Enlightenment foundationalism,
the primacy of practice and lived experience, the intentionality of conscious-
ness, and some related ideas. For James in particular, conceiving of experi-
ence in a non-atomistic way meant affirming what the earlier empiricism had
expressly denied: that we do indeed experience connections or relations
between different objects of sense rather than wholly discrete and discon-
nected events. As James articulated the basic point of radical empiricism:
the interaction of the human organism and its world, a part of the process
by which human life sustains itself and negotiates its way about an environ-
ment on a model that is at once biological and social. The concepts of
rational thought are neither Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas nor Kant’s
a priori categories nor innate ideas; instead they are historical and linguistic
constructions that fundamentally structure our experience. Dewey antici-
pated in some ways the new accent on language that would prevail in
phenomenological, hermeneutical, and other philosophical traditions
throughout the twentieth century in drawing attention to the linguistic
and interpretive dimension of human thought. Thus in Reconstruction in
Philosophy, Dewey wrote:
The conceptions that are socially current and important become the
child’s principles of interpretation and estimation long before he attains
to personal and deliberate control of conduct. Things come to him
clothed in language, not in physical nakedness, and this garb of commu-
nication makes him a sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These
beliefs coming to him as so many facts form his mind; they furnish the
centers about which his own personal expeditions and perceptions are
ordered. Here we have ‘categories’ of connection and unification as
important as those of Kant, but empirical not mythological.30
This important passage – which owes as much to James as to Hegel – not only
anticipates a great deal of later twentieth-century philosophy but puts in
question the orthodox empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. The em-
pirical is now to be theorized in terms of James’ ‘stream of thought’ or
consciousness, as an organic and synthetic process by which human beings
find their way about the world.
The rationality that, for Dewey, is immanent to human experience is what
he termed ‘experimental intelligence’, a rather expansive concept which I
shall analyze in more detail in Chapter 3. If the older empiricism erred in its
conception of mind as a passive and prelinguistic receptacle of sensory data,
the new empiricism would accentuate the active and synthetic dimension of
experience that Dewey articulated in his concept of the experimental. It is
the nature of experience to be at once passive and active, not merely to
receive sensory input but actively to interpret, categorize, and transform it in
the manner of an experiment directed toward a pragmatic end. Particular
sensations are not self-enclosed units but rather ‘points of adjustment’ by
which consciousness is organized in an organic and dialectical fashion into a
larger flow of perceptions all of which are ultimately subservient to, or
indeed are, the life of the organism. Experience in this sense is life itself, the
growth or being-in-motion of a worldly subjectivity.31 It is an experience that
66 The Educative Process
is temporal and adaptive, that adjusts itself to objects in the world while
simultaneously transforming them to suit its own purposes, and that is con-
tinually growing and expanding. Experience is ‘an affair of the intercourse
of a living being with its physical and social environment’.32 Such ‘inter-
course’, to use one of Dewey’s favorite expressions, is to be understood not
solely in biological or evolutionary terms but in social and cultural terms as
well. The human being is a social animal in every facet of its being, and is by
no means the worldless atom of Hobbesian lore (a theme that Dewey
frequently discussed in his ethical and political writings33).
The experimental model of experience and rationality finds its highest
expression in scientific investigation wherein inquiry is both a social practice
of co-operative experimentation and dialogical reciprocity as well as an
empirical inquiry into the constitution of our environment. While the exper-
imental attitude seeks knowledge regarding the way the world is, it is not
limited to this but aims as well at achieving a high degree of control. If expe-
rience, as Dewey put it, ‘is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings’,
and thus includes both an active and a passive dimension, its active side
consists of interaction with an environment that is, again, conceived on the
model of biological life.34 Experience has a vitality about it that impels the
subject of experience to take action in pursuit of its ends rather than merely
to receive impressions or perhaps adapt to the world as it is encountered.
It should have gone without saying, although for many of Dewey’s casual
readers it did not, that no little effort is an inevitable part of the learning
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 69
process, that discipline and rigor are fundamental to the pedagogical practice
of directing interests within certain channels in view of the educator’s knowl-
edge. Interest is the starting point of education, but in order for the process
to advance it must lead into lines of inquiry that require concentration,
perseverance, and intellectual discipline.
Where traditional views had erred was not in prizing effort or the dis-
ciplined mind but in misconceiving the conditions that make this possible. A
worthy goal may be undermined by the means used to pursue it, as is the case
when the older practice of emphasizing drill and rote learning creates a
docile and unimaginative mind. As Dewey was well aware from his own expe-
rience as a student, children educated in the traditional manner can be
remarkably adept at giving the appearance of effort and attention while the
mind wanders the moment the teacher’s gaze is no longer fixed upon them.
The only guarantee of attention is when students see for themselves the
relevance of the subject matter to life and to that in which they take an
unforced interest. Without this condition in place, we fashion not the virile
character so prized by the conservative philosophy but ‘a character dull,
mechanical, unalert, because the vital juice of spontaneous interest has been
squeezed out’ or ‘the narrow, bigoted man who is obstinate and irresponsi-
ble save in the line of his own preconceived aims and beliefs’.40 For Dewey, it
is a mystifying proposition that discipline should be effectively gained only
when the mind studies a subject matter more or less against its will rather
than on the basis of intelligent interest. If conservatives would sometimes
concede the need to ‘make it interesting’ by identifying pedagogical tech-
niques that make the curriculum more palatable to young minds, it
remained for Dewey that in the absence of a vital connection between the
subject matter and students’ interests such techniques can only serve as the
sugar coating on a bitter pill.
Having identified the point of departure of the educative process as the
experience and interests that students bring with them into the classroom,
everything in education then depends upon that to which such interests
lead. It is here that the educator’s role is vital in directing or redirecting
these interests along properly educative lines. If the traditional practice had
trained the young to imitate prematurely ‘the fixed pattern of adult habits
of thought and affection’, Dewey’s proposal was that schools not regard
children as little adults but instead concentrate on guiding their experience
by centering an interest on a particular end.41 It is in the nature of experi-
ence and interest alike that one thing, as we say, leads to another; when
appropriately directed, a relatively narrow and pedestrian interest can lead
into an organized activity or inquiry that broadens the scope of that interest
and introduces an intelligent ordering of experiences. In an important
passage from a short book of 1912, Interest and Effort in Education, Dewey
70 The Educative Process
asked his readers to recall how their present intellectual interests originally
took shape. What occurs is that an interest, usually limited in scope, leads
beyond itself into a larger sequence of activities, a project or investigation
into the whys and wherefores surrounding it. Questions arise as to an object’s
composition, history, or implications in one direction or another, and an
organized subject matter arises. What we find, as Dewey put it, is that
A given interest can grow well beyond its original context as new questions
are formed and inquiries undertaken. With the passage of time the original
interest is outgrown and replaced with a series of other, more sophisticated
ones. A subject matter that had been regarded with indifference when
viewed solely as an abstract matter can take on urgency when it is shown to
arise out of a series of activities and interests that already engage the student,
while immature interests are superseded. Thus a child’s interest in his or her
home and neighborhood can lead into an interest in the larger town, into
the town’s history or geography, and subsequently into the history or geog-
raphy of the native country, continent, and so on. In time, the child’s interest
in history may develop into one in larger historical patterns, the history of
other civilizations, or intellectual history. A child’s interest in the parents’
hardware store may grow into a larger curiosity about economics, account-
ing, or political economy; a childish interest in paint, for instance, may
develop into an interest in its physical or chemical composition, and in time
into dimensions of chemistry or physics far afield from paint. An attachment
to an old article of furniture may grow into an interest in antiques or the
history of furniture or architectural styles, into the trade of cabinetmaking or
woodworking, and so on.43 The examples may be easily multiplied, and the
point that they illustrate is the interconnectedness of human activities and,
due to this, the organic nature in which interests develop from relative
immaturity to progressive sophistication.
Outside of an academic setting, interests may develop quite spontaneously
on the basis of lived experience alone and occurrences that may be entirely
happenstance. However, within these settings it is the business of educators
to guide intellectual development by redirecting interests and not, as some
progressives took Dewey to imply, by leaving students at complete liberty to
do as they will. While it is a mistake for a teacher to dominate the course of
inquiry by directing students’ interests along lines that suit only the purpose
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 71
of the teacher rather than the students, the mistake is not remedied by a
swing to the opposite extreme in which the teacher takes no active part in
the process. In his later years Dewey would criticize many progressives for
falling into the second error while traditionalists had committed the first:
How many students, for example, were rendered callous to ideas, and how
many lost the impetus to learn because of the ways in which learning was
experienced by them? How many acquired special skills by means of auto-
matic drill so that their power of judgment and capacity to act intelligently
in new situations was limited? How many came to associate the learning
process with ennui and boredom? How many found what they did learn so
foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no power
of control over the latter? How many came to associate books with dull
drudgery, so that they were ‘conditioned’ to all but flashy reading matter?53
The distinction, then, between the educative and the non- or miseducative
turns upon the relation of a given experience to further experience, includ-
ing both what is prior to it and that to which it leads.
The role of the educator, accordingly, is not to be the passive bystander in
the classroom that many progressives mistakenly took Dewey to be recom-
mending, nor to be the classic authoritarian of the traditional philosophy,
but to take up an intermediate position or perhaps a higher synthesis of the
two extremes. Whether in the elementary school or the university, the
educator is a leader of inquiry and director of the kind of activities that he
or she can anticipate will lead in a direction that is worth pursuing, whether
for the knowledge that is to be gained, the intellectual habits it will instill, or
the capacities it will develop. In many ways, then, the educator’s role is far
more difficult than has traditionally been thought, and extends beyond
mastering the subject matter or knowing effective pedagogical techniques
and perhaps disciplinary methods to include a knowledge of the students
themselves, of their psychology and life experience, of the various avenues
toward which a given curriculum may lead, and in general of the larger
trajectory of which the present inquiry is a part. It extends as well to knowing
the obstacles in a student’s psychology or social background that can
adversely affect their ability to learn, the different styles of learning, and
related issues that traditional methods had overlooked.
The ultimate concern of the educator as Dewey conceived of it thus
accords fully with the etymology of the word ‘education’ itself, a term that
connotes both ‘a drawing out’ and ‘a leading forth’.54 Human intelligence is
drawn out precisely by a leading forth of the student from what they have
experienced to what they might yet experience. This process of intellectual
development or growth may unfold outside of the classroom environment,
but the true business of the teacher and professor is to carry the process
forward in a way that is not dependent on chance occurrences in the
students’ out-of-school environment and to lead them toward any experi-
ence or knowledge that enhances the capacity to learn after the period of
formal education ends.
76 The Educative Process
students’ experience and the conditions of its further development, yet even
revolutions gain their orientation from the ancien régime to which they are a
response and typically remain in the latter’s orbit long after the revolution
has taken place. If this is observable in political history it is equally evident
in the fashioning of philosophical positions which inevitably retain traces of
that in opposition to which they were originally formulated. Dewey’s radical
reformulation of the philosophy of education is no exception to this,
although I would urge this point not as a critique of Dewey’s position but as
a reminder of the manner in which we ought to interpret and ultimately
come to terms with it.
How, then, did Dewey reply to the question regarding the ‘something
more’ that the educative process properly aims to achieve beyond the
obvious practical benefits associated with career preparation and perhaps
social respectability – in the conventional sense of ascending to a higher
rung on the socio-economic ladder? His answer turned upon his notion of
intellectual growth or what in different contexts he referred to as the ‘spirit
of inquiry’, the ‘spirit of curiosity’, and ‘the quality of mental process’ that
he distinguished from ‘the production of correct answers’.55 Education aims
at producing minds that are not merely capable of entering the workforce or
respectable society, or that have amassed a certain body of information, but
that possess the capacity and inclination to learn more in the course of
future experience. The educated mind is characterized by particular intel-
lectual virtues and by the absence of corresponding vices. What exactly these
virtues and vices are is the question to which I now turn.
Throughout his writings on education and on some related issues, Dewey
made frequent reference to a fundamental attitude of mind or intellectual
posture that is the mark of educational success as well as to its antithesis. The
following passages are representative:
A person who has gained the power of reflective attention, the power to
hold problems, questions, before the mind, is in so far, intellectually
speaking, educated. He has mental discipline – power of the mind and for
the mind. Without this the mind remains at the mercy of custom and
external suggestions.56
The best thing that can be said about any special process of education,
like that of the formal school period, is that it renders its subject capable
of further education: more sensitive to conditions of growth and more
able to take advantage of them. Acquisition of skill, possession of know-
ledge, attainment of culture are not ends: they are marks of growth and
means to its continuing.57
78 The Educative Process
The intellectual vices that for Dewey are the marks of educational failure
go well beyond the inability to retain information or understand difficult
concepts to include inflexibility of mind, dogmatism, narrowness of horizon,
parochialism, inattention, conventionality, and apathy, among others. The
over-reliance on custom and deference to authority which the old education
had instilled produce a docility of mind that leaves one at the mercy of intel-
lectual fashion and ill-equipped to challenge the orthodoxy of the times. It
was a serious worry of Dewey’s that the general populations of America and
Europe had become too unresisting to political propaganda in particular,
and it is less the politicians than the educational institutions that are the
culprit. Rather than instilling the spirit of inquiry, educators in most any
field teach the art of acceptance – of received wisdom, information, or the
educator’s beliefs – and an unquestioning attitude toward ideas that are
presented to students in the guise of facts rather than hypotheses and instru-
ments of analysis. The resulting disposition is one to which it does not occur
that there is any need for questioning, one that lacks a capacity to discern
what is questionable and what is not. If the ‘natural tendency of man is
not to press home a doubt, but to cut inquiry as short as possible’, this
tendency is aided and abetted by educational practices that breed intellec-
tual laziness and passive acceptance of controversial hypotheses as orthodox
fact.65
Another intellectual failing upon which Dewey frequently remarked is the
tendency toward overspecialization and the academic scholasticism and
narrowing of perspective that inevitably follow from this. A certain thought-
lessness accompanies the trend that increasingly conscripts students, educa-
tors, professionals, and workers alike into narrow specialties beyond which
the individual will often know remarkably little. The important matter of the
connections between separate fields of inquiry or the relations between
different experiential domains is increasingly unlearned, and not only within
the sciences in which this may be thought an inevitable consequence of the
advancement of knowledge but within the humanities and the arts no less.
Dewey was particularly concerned about the trend toward excessive special-
ization in his own discipline of philosophy and – as I shall discuss in Chapter
4 – the high price that this and any other field of investigation pays when
those within it become uncognizant of all that lies outside a narrow field of
expertise. A related phenomenon is the remoteness and disconnection of
the university from the broader culture and the irrelevance of so much of
what takes place there. As Dewey remarked, ‘it would sometimes seem that
only athletic exhibitions form a direct line of connection between the
college and the average community life’ – an observation hardly less accurate
today than in 1901 when Dewey wrote these words.66 The increasingly blink-
ered nature of research and subject matter in post-secondary institutions
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 81
structure of the hermeneutic circle. One does not decide to enter the
hermeneutic circle; phenomenologically, one is always already thinking
within it. The choice to be made is not whether to enter this circle but how
to negotiate one’s way within it, how to reconcile part with whole and whole
with part in a way that brings about coherence and meaning.68 By the same
token, students in educational settings have no choice but to bring their
experience into the classroom and to learn on this basis. This is the context
in which learning takes place, not any purely rational or ‘academic’ (non-)
context of information and blackboard exercises. Were students not beings-
in-the-world but computers or perhaps gods, no appeal to experience would
be necessary. Yet we must take students as we find them, with a point of view
that is at once intellectual, psychological, cultural, and existential, and which
is summarized in the notion of experience.
A question we must ask in coming to critical terms with Dewey’s philoso-
phy of education is how well his experimental conception of experience
stands up today. We may well accept his case for a shift in the ‘center of
gravity’ of education while having some reservations about his conception of
experience itself. While the conception that Dewey articulated is commend-
ably rich and expansive, particularly in comparison with earlier forms of
empiricism, I wish to argue for a still more expansive view, the general
contours of which roughly accord with Dewey’s position yet without its
somewhat reductionist and scientistic tendencies. Dewey was never inclined
toward positivism or any uncritical idolatry of science (despite what certain
of his critics alleged), yet he did regard scientific experimentation as the
paradigm case of intelligently directed experience.69 We may wish to ask,
however, why science should hold so central a place in our understanding of
experience rather than, say, the encounter with art or literature or history.
Is an educational encounter with literature properly understood in terms of
scientific inquiry? If we are so enamored with science that we would wish to
answer this question in the affirmative, it would seem to me that we are
making the phenomenon fit the theory. A work of literature is an object to
be experienced, to be sure, but is it to be inquired into in quite the sense that
a physicist inquires into the atom or an astronomer investigates black holes?
A negative answer need not prompt us to reject Dewey’s account, but it does
raise the question of the limits of experience as experimental intelligence
and cause us to inquire further into the concept of experience itself. There
may be more to the concept than what Dewey has given us.
There may indeed be far more, as becomes evident when we examine the
history of the concept of experience in more detail than the cursory overview
above. Fortunately we find a guide to this in Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience,
in which he endeavors to show that philosophical theories of experience
both ancient and modern are ‘as much “songs” of passion as sober analyses’.
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 83
This content is like a yield or result that achieves permanence, weight, and
significance from out of the transience of experiencing. Both meanings
obviously lie behind the coinage Erlebnis: both the immediacy, which
precedes all interpretation, reworking, and communication, and merely
offers a starting point for interpretation – material to be shaped – and its
discovered yield, its lasting result.72
One emerges from it with new insights and a richer understanding or self-
understanding; one has learned – and not only where this means gaining
information or successfully concluding a course of inquiry, but in the sense
that one’s stance toward the world has been altered.
Gadamer would speak of experience (Erfahrung) and of ‘being experi-
enced’ in terms that accord roughly with Dewey’s view while in a way going
beyond it. ‘The truth of experience’, as he wrote, ‘always implies an orienta-
tion toward new experience.’ It is neither simply an outcome of a certain
kind – the condition of having amassed a tidy sum of facts and observations
– nor a method but a posture toward the future. As a result of what one has
learned, one is oriented toward future experience with a disposition of
openness and curiosity.
That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only
through experiences but is also open to new experiences. The consumma-
tion of his experience, the perfection that we call ‘being experienced’,
does not consist in the fact that someone already knows everything and
knows better than anyone else. Rather, the experienced person proves to
be, on the contrary, someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because
of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn
from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to
learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfilment not
in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made
possible by experience itself.77
. . . involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are
against me, even though no one else forces me to do so. . . . I must allow
tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the
past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me.
This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness.80
In forming the object – that is, in being selflessly active and concerned
with a universal – working consciousness raises itself above the immediacy
of its existence to universality; or, as Hegel puts it, by forming the thing it
forms itself. What he means is that in acquiring a ‘capacity’, a skill, man
gains the sense of himself.84
One works not only, and not essentially, to consume the object of one’s labor
but to form it and oneself thereby. One comes into one’s own or fashions
oneself precisely by putting oneself aside or, at any rate, those aspects of
one’s being that are immediately given and unformed. Following Hegel,
Gadamer would also speak of the universal as exacting a demand; one’s com-
mitment to knowledge or justice acts as a restraint on desire and the grosser
forms of self-interest, thus imposing a kind of training and order on the self
that is difficult and ennobling. This process of inner cultivation – which is to
say the process of human experience in general – does not end and has no
goals outside of itself.
But as much as Bildung refers to the experiential process, it equally refers
to its results. The person who is formed in this way has a sense about it: a
sense of what is proportionate and important, of what is beautiful or right.
Thus the cultivated person has a sense of tact or of the aesthetic which is very
different from a technique. One is able to make judgments without follow-
ing rules and may be quite unable to produce formal arguments to ground
them, even as one’s judgments are correct. As Gadamer rather eloquently
described the sense of tact, for instance:
preserve distance. It avoids the offensive, the intrusive, the violation of the
intimate sphere of the person.85
Much the same can be said of the sense of memory. Here too one develops,
or fails to develop, a sense of what is memorable. What a good memory is not
is an indiscriminate piling up of past experiences in the mind or ability to
retrieve them on command. It is a sense of what is worthy of remembrance
and a selective retention of this and only this, not of anything and every-
thing.
Bildung, then, is marked by the possession of this sense, or senses, and is
simultaneously a cultivation of the self and an orientation toward the uni-
versal. Experience must therefore be understood dialectically, or in terms of
a structural reversal of consciousness. One recognizes oneself – one becomes
oneself – in venturing beyond one’s private immediacy and encountering
what is other. It is in this encounter that one recognizes oneself, and pre-
cisely not by withdrawing into some private sanctum of interiority. One
ventures forth in experience and returns a changed being; one has learned,
become experienced, and become open to future venturings. Although one
has amassed information in the process, this is not what is essential. What is
is the transition from one state of being to another. The encounter with what
is other transforms one from one’s ‘natural being’ to a state of cultivation
and higher sensibility, or as Gadamer, in a Hegelian mood, expressed it, ‘To
recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic
movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what
is other.’ If experience, or consciousness, is dialectically structured, and if
‘keeping oneself open to what is other’ is thus ‘the general characteristic of
Bildung’, such an openness is as much a necessary condition of experience as
its culmination.86 An openness to what is novel and unknown is the very
lifeblood of experience.
‘[G]etting beyond his naturalness’ may also describe the transition from
the transient immediacy of Erlebnis to the more reflective mode of experi-
ence that is Erfahrung.87 If for Dewey the educator’s task in essence is to guide
students from an experience that is immature to one that is intellectually
differentiated and sophisticated, this process may well be articulated as the
transition from Erlebnis to Erfahrung – a characterization that he might well
have accepted had the distinction been part of his philosophical vocabulary.
Where he spoke of the learning process as proceeding typically from the
concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the universal, and from
the practical to the theoretical, he might also – and better – have spoken of
the transition from the unformed to the formed, from the narrow and
parochial to the expansive and open, and from nature to culture, and where
these values are not conceived in abstract opposition. The experienced
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 93
person no less than the educated has been cultivated in such a way that they
are hospitable to new ideas, curious and restless of mind. They possess the
intellectual virtues and the experiential continuity and interaction of which
Dewey spoke while also exhibiting qualities of which he did not speak but
might have, that is, which are consistent with the spirit of his philosophy of
experience and education but not altogether with its letter. The concepts of
Bildung and Erfahrung both suggest an experience that is continuous in
Dewey’s sense while showing a dialectical and also a narrative quality that is
better articulated in phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy than
in radical empiricism and pragmatism.
Experience in what Gadamer called ‘the genuine sense’ is temporally
elongated, integrated, meaningful, and transformative. Its significance is
understood in terms of a story that unfolds over time and decidedly not as a
mere succession of happenings disconnected from each other. The experi-
ential continuity that largely distinguishes radical from British empiricism is
a narrative continuity since it is this form of interpretation that renders
meaningful, or understandable, human experience in general. It is precisely
by fitting our experiences together into a followable story that they gain the
continuity and interactivity that Dewey identified as the criteria of genuinely
educative experience.
I wish to add by way of a conclusion a remark or two, to which I shall
return in later chapters, regarding Erfahrung and Bildung as they bear upon
certain conditions of modern life. It does not appear to me that the present
times are well suited to the kind of experience and cultivation that these
concepts evoke, whether we are speaking of the realities of education or
more generally of the state of modern life as a whole. The realities of the
classroom, which directly reflect the condition of social life in general, are
such that appeals to theoretical notions such as these can appear hopelessly
academic when pressures to get through the material, prepare students for
examinations, deal with administrative inanities, and cope with behavioral
problems can make ideals of this or any kind seem like castles in the air.
Indeed, one may get the impression that a great deal of educational theory
is yet another scholasticism whose debates are contemporary equivalents of
consubstantiation versus transubstantiation. One may even be right about
this, in cases, but in the present case it is worth asking whether the ideals of
experiential integration, narrative continuity, and personal cultivation of
which I have been speaking are genuine possibilities for educational prac-
tices that are beset by conditions of the kind just noted. Educators charged
with preparing students for standardized examinations and who have little or
no freedom to select the curriculum will find it difficult, to say the least, to
identify natural continuities between their particular students’ experience
and the standardized curriculum that is imposed on them. Are any ideals
94 The Educative Process
possible under this condition, or does it reduce the whole business so thor-
oughly to a technical matter of information-bestowing and information-
cramming that the discussion we have been having is a perfect irrelevance?
To the extent that such conditions continue to prevail, philosophical ideals
of every kind – not only the ones spoken of here – are not only unattainable
but something far worse: they are beside the point. There is no leading of
young minds from Erlebnis to Erfahrung in an institution modeled on Hirsch’s
conservatism, for instance, no place for the intellectual virtues at all aside
from the most rudimentary, and except by accident no possibility of any
‘rising up to humanity through culture’. When culture itself is flattened out
to a mere sum of information, as for Hirsch it is, there is nothing there to
which one can rise up; there are only facts to be crammed in, piled up, or
plastered on. The sad reality is that this is often what education comes to,
and in such a philosophy (or antiphilosophy) there are no ideals to be had
but for such singularly empty notions as efficiency and cultural literacy.
It often appears as if the times, in which the latter notions are so readily
at home, are such that the kind of ideals that a Dewey or a Gadamer recom-
mended are complete no-hopers since they fit so poorly into present ways of
thinking and fly in the face even of many approaches that claim them as an
influence. It often seems as well that conditions outside of educational insti-
tutions render these ideals still more untimely. The frantic pace of modern
life combined with the fragmentation of experience, the temporariness of
nearly everything, the fleeting and superficial nature of so much of what
occupies us and what we care about do not bode well for a conception of
experience as enduring, meaningful, and at times profound. Dewey
lamented as far back as 1934 the impoverished state of human experience in
the twentieth century, a lament far more appropriate at present than when
he commented on the extent to which
zeal for doing, lust for action, leaves many a person, especially in this
hurried and impatient human environment in which we live, with ex-
perience of an almost incredible paucity, all on the surface. No one
experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is
entered upon so speedily. What is called experience is so dispersed and
miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the name.88
Notes
1. ‘Now the change which is coming into our education is the shifting of the center of
gravity. It is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when
the astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the child
becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the center
about which they are organized.’ Dewey, The School and Society (1900). MW 1: 23.
2. Dewey, ‘The Need for a Philosophy of Education’ (1934). LW 9: 194.
3. Dewey, ‘The Psychological Aspect of the School Curriculum’ (1897). EW 5: 171.
Similar sentiments are found throughout Dewey’s writings on education.
4. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 7.
96 The Educative Process
5. Dewey, ‘Report of Interview with John Dewey’, by Charles W. Wood (1922). MW 13:
427.
6. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 6.
7. Dewey, ‘Current Tendencies in Education’ (1917). MW 10: 120.
8. Dewey, ‘The Psychological Aspect of the School Curriculum’ (1897). EW 5: 166.
9. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 14–15, 14. Dewey continues in the
same vein: ‘We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up – words which express the
difference of level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the word education
means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome of the
process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding activity – that
is, a shaping into the standard form of social activity.’
10. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 5.
11. Dewey, How We Think (rev. edn, 1933). LW 8: 194, 193.
12. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 216.
13. Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (1909). MW 4: 284.
14. Dewey, ‘How the Mind Learns’, Educational Lectures Before Brigham Young
Academy (1901). LW 17: 214. Elsewhere Dewey wrote: ‘Yet by way of expiation we
envy children their love of new experiences, their intentness in extracting the last
drop of significance from each situation, their vital seriousness in things that to us are
outworn.’ Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (1922). MW 14: 72.
15. The entire paragraph reads: ‘All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this
is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved
for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to
action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might
say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know
and brings to light many differences between things.’ Aristotle, Metaphysics in The
Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 980a
22–28.
16. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 194, 194–5.
17. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 29–30.
18. ‘Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his school days and wonder
what has become of the knowledge he was supposed to have amassed during his years
of schooling, and why it is that the technical skills he acquired have to be learned over
again in changed form in order to stand him in good stead. Indeed, he is lucky who
does not find that in order to make progress, in order to go ahead intellectually, he
does not have to unlearn much of what he learned in school. These questions cannot
be disposed of by saying that the subjects were not actually learned, for they were
learned at least sufficiently to enable a pupil to pass examinations in them.’ Dewey,
Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 28.
19. When I think back on my own adolescence, for example, I can recall virtually nothing
of at least half of the courses that I studied in high school, even what subjects they
covered, yet can remember the lyrics to just about every song that the Eagles ever
recorded and hockey statistics of every imaginable kind.
20. Dewey, ‘Education, Direct and Indirect’ (1904). MW 3: 240.
21. Dewey, The School and Society (1900). MW 1: 24.
22. Ibid., 8. Dewey would express much the same even-handedness in the following
remarks from 1932: ‘I remember the village in which stood my grandfather’s house,
where in my childhood I went to spend the summer vacation. There in the village was
the old-fashioned sawmill, the old-fashioned gristmill, the old-fashioned tannery; and
in my grandfather’s house there were still the candles and the soap which had been
made in the home itself. At certain times the cobbler would come around to spend a
few days in the neighborhood, making and repairing the shoes of the people.
Dewey’s Copernican Revolution 97
Through the very conditions of living, everybody had a pretty direct contact with
nature and with the simpler forms of industry. As there were no great accumulations
of wealth, the great majority of young people got a very genuine education through
a kind of informal apprenticeship. They took part in the home-made duties of the
household and farm and activities of the neighborhood. They saw with their eyes, and
followed with their imaginations, the very real activities about them. The amount of
genuine education, and of training in good habits that were obtained in this way
under earlier pioneer conditions, is not easy to overestimate. There was a real educa-
tion through real contact with actual materials and important social occupations.
‘On the other hand, knowledge in the form of written and printed word then had
what economists call a “scarcity value.” Books, newspapers, periodicals, in a word
reading matter of all kinds, were much rarer and more expensive than they are today.
Libraries were comparatively few. Learning, or rather the mastery of the tools of
learning, the ability to read and to write and to figure, had a high value, because the
school was the one place where these tools of learning could be mastered.’ Dewey,
‘Monastery, Bargain Counter, or Laboratory in Education?’ (1932). LW 6: 102.
23. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 136, 137.
24. See James A. Good’s A Search for Unity in Diversity: The ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’ in the
Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006) for a thorough treatment
of Dewey’s profound indebtedness to Hegel throughout his lifetime and well beyond
his break with the Hegelianism of his youth – which, as Good demonstrates, was far
more a break from British Hegelianism than from Hegel himself.
25. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996), 42.
26. See James, The Principle of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), especially chapter
9, ‘The Stream of Thought’.
27. Dewey, ‘The Psychological Standpoint’ (1886). EW 1: 123. Dewey reiterated the point
on the following page: ‘Now the psychological standpoint is this: nothing shall be
admitted into philosophy which does not show itself in experience, and its nature,
that is, its place in experience shall be fixed by an account of the process of knowl-
edge – by Psychology.’
28. Dewey, ‘Experience and Existence: A Comment’ (1949). LW 16: 383. Regarding ‘the
influence of William James’ on his thought, Dewey wrote in 1930: ‘As far as I can
discover one specifiable philosophic factor which entered my thinking so far as to
give it a new direction and quality, it is this one.’ Dewey, ‘From Absolutism to Exper-
imentalism’ (1930). LW 5: 157. Dewey would also endeavor quite frequently to defend
James against his often hostile and uncharitable critics such as Bertrand Russell and
G. E. Moore, among others. The carelessness with which such critics would often
dismiss James, and often Dewey as well, was an obvious source of irritation to him.
The following passage is typical in this regard: ‘James is an essayist, and he enjoys
writing. When he writes about a problem, he uses figurative language, and elaborates
his point even to a degree of exaggeration. The fact that James enjoys his use of
literary license has made him vulnerable to misinterpretation by unfriendly critics.’
Dewey, ‘Three Contemporary Philosophers’ (1920). MW 12: 219.
29. Dewey, ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’ (1917). MW 10: 11.
30. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1916). MW 12: 132.
31. Ibid., 131.
32. Dewey, ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’ (1917). MW 10: 6.
33. See, for example, Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (in MW 14), Freedom and Culture
(LW 13), Individualism, Old and New (LW 5), The Public and its Problems (LW 2), and
Ethics (LW 7), among others.
34. Dewey, ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’ (1917). MW 10: 9.
98 The Educative Process
Theorists of all persuasions agree that whatever the true business of educa-
tion is, it crucially bears on what is rather ambiguously termed thought or
thinking. Disagreements most often center on the proper objects of thought
– which subject matters are of relative importance at which stages in the
learning process – and the methodology by which particular curricula are
most effectively taught and learned. Other disagreements pertain to whether
it is the content of thought, in the sense of which items of knowledge or
belief are to be instilled and what students are to accept as the truth or the
good, or the capacity to think independently that matters most and is the
true mark of educational success. Beneath these and the many other dis-
agreements that have long occupied theorists is the shared conviction that
thought, whatever it is, is the central concern of education. Logically prior
to questions of the what and the how of education is the question in the title
of this chapter. Since Plato, the more ambitious philosophers of education
have often posed this question directly along with related questions con-
cerning what is knowledge, reason, and truth. If the educative process
involves a transition of some description from ignorance to knowledge, of
which Plato’s allegory of the cave affords the classical model, how are we
to theorize this transition? It is a transition from a state of not knowing or
ignorance, something that requires no elaborate philosophical account, to
something that manifestly does: knowing, understanding, thinking. What,
then, are these? For that matter, is this one question or three?
While Dewey regarded the three questions as distinct in principle, answer-
ing them requires fashioning a unified account of mental life which high-
lights the organic connections between the philosophically distinct
categories of thinking, knowledge, truth, experience, and understanding.
The specific question of what thought itself is, for Dewey the Jamesian
empiricist, is of course an empirical, or better phenomenological, matter, as
the title of one of his major works, How We Think, rather matter-of-factly
suggests. The phenomenological question of what thinking is and the logic
by which, as a matter of fact, it unfolds in various fields of inquiry has
primacy over the epistemological or methodological question of how we
ought to think, as if the latter could be answered in an a priori fashion.
101
102 The Educative Process
On the question of what thinking itself is, Dewey defined this rather con-
cisely as a ‘response to the doubtful as such’.4 It is essentially the practice of
experimental inquiry into a given problem, the aim of which consists in ‘the
directed or controlled transformation of an indeterminate situation into a
determinately unified one’.5 Thinking responds to a doubtful or problematic
situation – the unknown, anomalous, or perplexing – by posing questions,
advancing interpretations and hypotheses, following the course of a given
hypothesis to its conclusion, testing it against the available evidence, and
looking for specific experiential consequences. It is a process that never loses
connection with experience, arising from a doubtful situation within it and
ultimately returning to it with an enhanced knowledge of the connections
between events or ideas and the significance of the original situation.
‘Thinking is thus equivalent’, in Dewey’s words, ‘to an explicit rendering of
the intelligent element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with an
end in view.’6
What thinking is not is precisely what it is so often taken to be by educa-
tors: in essence an affair either of following rules or of amassing information
in the largest possible quantity combined with the capacity for recall. What
this ‘cold-storage ideal of knowledge’ overlooks is the active and creative
dimension of thought. While it is not to be doubted that an education in
thinking necessarily involves gaining information about a given field of study,
and often a great deal of it, thinking itself refers to what is done with such
information or the purposes to which it is turned. The cold-storage concep-
tion, no less than traditional notions of education in which the art of
thinking is a far less urgent matter than the content of what students know
and believe, is positively inimical to thought for the reason that the mind
that is overladen with ill-digested facts is effectively smothered and unable to
put such information to meaningful use. Not only are opportunities for intel-
ligent inquiry not taken advantage of, but ‘it swamps thinking’ by piling on
information that exceeds the students’ capacity to interrogate or integrate
constructively into their experience.7 Learning in the popular sense of
absorbing information more or less passively which may be retrieved at a
later time should the occasion arise is a stage on the way to thinking, but it
is not itself the genuine article or the ultimate aim of education. Rather, it is
a secondary matter – not unimportant, as Dewey’s critics sometimes alleged,
but secondary and instrumental to the development of intellectual capacity.
In 1937 Dewey illustrated this point with respect to the study of civics as
follows:
There is, I think, considerable danger that this phase of social study will
get submerged in a great flood of miscellaneous social study. When the
subject was first introduced, I think there was a good deal of evidence of
What Is Called Thinking? 105
Much the same can be said of how at the present time we often teach in the
arts, humanities, and social sciences on the premise that if only students
become informed about philosophy, history, or anthropology they will
become philosophers, historians, or anthropologists by some automatic
process, perhaps at some point during their doctoral studies. That this is not
so is readily observable when we consider the innumerable instances of
students graduating from the university with an impressive array of facts at
their disposal yet unable to turn them to creative use. Nothing ‘simulates
knowledge’ or thought, Dewey observed, ‘and thereby develops the poison
of conceit’ quite as effectively as information piled high in memory and
available to be showcased upon the occasion of an examination or social
gathering.9
What thinking also is not is what would better go under the name of in-
culcation or indoctrination, for which it is also frequently mistaken. When
educators set about prescribing what students shall believe, particularly as it
concerns controversial opinions and still more when students have not
reached an age of intellectual maturity, they are instilling habits not of
intelligent thought but of unreasoning submission. Quite apart from the
intentions of educators, which in the usual course of things may be entirely
beneficent, the practice of instilling a particular set of beliefs on the pretense
that they are training the mind is positively miseducative and very nearly the
opposite of what it claims to be. Even supposing such beliefs to be true, the
mark of an educated mind is not at all the content of one’s convictions –
whether one be liberal or conservative, religious or irreligious, egoist or
altruist – but rather the manner in which one’s beliefs are arrived at, the
reasons one can adduce on their behalf, one’s ability to draw connections
between ideas and experience, to defend one’s position against rival views,
and so on.10 Thinking pertains to the method, and indeed is the method, by
which beliefs are rationally acquired and is thus far less concerned with end
states than processes. The process itself, as he would continually emphasize,
requires the students’ active participation and thus an overcoming of both
the educator’s temptation to indoctrinate and the intellectual laziness and
conventionality that, in his view, most often characterize youth.11 Dewey’s
106 The Educative Process
Pragmatic intelligence
Understanding Dewey’s account of thought as inquiry and his philosophy of
education more generally requires viewing both in light of the pragmatist or
experimentalist (instrumentalist) theory of knowledge that he appropriated
primarily from William James. Without going into the details of this episte-
mology, a pragmatic conception of knowledge accentuates the connection
between thought and action or the relation of ideas to problematic situations
that arise in the course of human conduct and experience.13 Although
Dewey, particularly later in his career, was less fond of the term ‘pragmatism’
itself than James – recommending in 1938 that we ‘avoid its use’ altogether
given the widespread and singularly uncharitable misinterpretations that
had surrounded this term – and was very mindful of the criticism that had
greeted James’ formulation of this in Pragmatism and its ‘sequel’, The
Meaning of Truth, the theory of knowledge that Dewey defended throughout
his career is thoroughly Jamesian (and to a lesser extent Peircean) in regard-
ing ‘consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions, provided
these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve
the specific problem evoking the operations’.14 The proviso was Dewey’s sup-
plement to James’ view (or clarification of it, given that even a moderately
charitable reading of James would include the proviso and does not lead to
the simplistic misreadings of pragmatism formulated by unsympathetic
critics like Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore and that have remained wide-
spread until the present day), and forestalls objections to the effect that a
pragmatic epistemology provides a philosophical rationalization for wishful
thinking or for whatever propositions one happens to hold dear.
In Dewey’s pragmatic instrumentalism, as he preferred to call it, the
process of inquiry is described phenomenologically in a fashion that over-
turns what he referred to as the ‘spectator conception of knowledge’ or ‘the
idea that knowledge is intrinsically a mere beholding or viewing of reality’,
on the model of unconditioned subjectivity on one side and an objective,
uninterpreted reality on the other. Against the spectator theory such as we
find it in rationalism and British empiricism, Dewey sought to render explicit
What Is Called Thinking? 107
Being nor a positivist’s utopia but as something intermediate between the two.
Science is something neither to be idealized dogmatically in the manner of
positivism nor brooded over in the fashion of certain existential thinkers but
regarded more modestly as a method, and a singularly useful one. It is,
moreover, the same method as that pursued with less elaborateness and exac-
titude in ostensibly non-scientific forms of inquiry. While the promise that
this method holds for the transformation of human affairs is nothing short
of revolutionary, in Dewey’s view, he stopped short of an uncritical idealiza-
tion of science of the kind that characterized many of his contemporaries.
Science represents an ideal of thought in the sense that here the method
of rational investigation that is proper to thought in general is visible in its
purest form. Distinguishing between science as a body of knowledge or
academic subject matter on one hand and a method on the other, it is the
latter that holds potential for liberation and advancement in all realms of
human concern. ‘The general adoption of the scientific attitude’ which
would effect ‘nothing less than a revolutionary change in morals, religion,
politics and industry’ means not that we ought all become physicists or biol-
ogists or acquire vast learning about the latest empirical discoveries but
that the ‘attitude’ and method of experimental ‘intelligence’ (to use one of
Dewey’s favorite expressions) is what is needed to bring about a radical trans-
formation in our ways of thinking and relating, both in liberating us from the
absolutes of the past and in supplying us with a positive model for human
knowledge.22
Regarding the exact nature of this model, Dewey stated in one of his more
concise descriptions:
[A] man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the last time he
observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with other
things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to
rain; looking up, he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he
then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be called
thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a
thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other
modes of activity. The likelihood that it will rain is, however, something
suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold; first he thinks of clouds, then he
looks and perceives them, and then he thinks of something he does not
see: a storm. This suggested possibility is the idea, the thought. If it is
believed in as a genuine possibility which may occur, it is the kind of
thought which falls within the scope of knowledge and which requires
reflective consideration.29
Nothing is more fatal to inquiry than conceiving of ideas as fixed verities that
must be adhered to regardless of where the investigative process leads or that
are above the fray of criticism and justification. Once Peirce had proposed
that the meaning of a given idea lies in the consequences to which it leads
for human practices, James and Dewey saw no reason not to extend this to
include the idea’s purpose and truth-value as well (an extension that Peirce
himself vehemently opposed, to the point of renaming his theory of
meaning ‘pragmaticism’ to distinguish it from the ‘pragmatism’ of James).
Reflective thinking
From the beginning, pragmatism’s critics have charged it with lacking a
certain reflective quality or even with anti-intellectualism, as if it constitutes
a counterpart within epistemology to a crude form of ethical utilitarianism.
Any association of truth-value with use-value for many represents a betrayal
of philosophy’s age-old promise of gaining an accurate knowledge of reality
in its true dimension, one that forswears all prejudice and enables us to
separate knowledge from mere opinion, reason from rhetoric, and the truth
itself from what merely passes for it in ordinary discourse. At first glance –
which many such critics never advanced beyond – it may indeed appear that
the pragmatic view of ideas as hypotheses and instruments of research rather
than fixed verities misses something essential to the life of the mind: some-
thing like reflection, contemplation, or understanding for its own sake
rather than as a means to a practical end. To many, it appeared as if
pragmatism was denying this and putting forward a crass and simplistic, even
antiphilosophical, conception of thought.
The inaccuracy of this impression is easily seen when one brackets the
reputation that pragmatism received a century ago and which remains wide-
spread to this day and actually reads Dewey’s works, in which he repeatedly
addressed the numerous misinterpretations of James’ and his own position
that continually appeared throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
An important case in point concerns the nature of reflective thought,
contemplation, and understanding in the sense of these terms that common
sense distinguishes from the pragmatic. The connotation of ‘pragmatic’ and
‘instrumental’ that James and Dewey invoked is not the narrow one of
common parlance. So far was Dewey from separating the practical from the
theoretical or the instrumental from the reflective that for this profoundly
dialectical thinker such dichotomies are renounced entirely along with the
everyday connotation of the pragmatic as lacking the depth dimension
associated with the contemplative and philosophical. Indeed, one of Dewey’s
most enduring concerns as both an education theorist and cultural critic was
precisely the manner in which traditional pedagogy and the general society
What Is Called Thinking? 113
The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the difficulty, sinks, deter-
mines the quality of the thinking that follows; and any habit of teaching
114 The Educative Process
Dewey all but defined the condition of being educated as the capacity for
reflective thought in a sense that includes the power to articulate and pursue
questions to their depths and to ‘go below the surface’ of appearances in the
way that philosophy has always prized, to reject the premature answer and
the facile conclusion in favor of slow and rigorous investigation.38 The term
‘reflective thought’ itself he defined as the ‘[a]ctive, persistent, and careful
consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the
grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends’, thus
as an explicitly philosophical or scientific search for the basis of human
knowledge.39 It searches as well for the connecting links in human experi-
ence between one problematic situation and another, between different lines
of inquiry or whole fields of study, and between a particular subject matter
and its larger significance for human life. As mentioned in Chapter 2, an
important part of what distinguishes radical empiricism from its predecessor
in British thought is the accent placed by the former on relations or con-
nections within experience in contrast to the experiential atomism of the
older tradition. Since it is experience that constitutes the proper object of
reflective thought, such thought pays particular attention to these connec-
tions rather than studying objects or ideas apart from the context that
supplies them with meaning. Philosophical concepts, for instance, are
properly studied not as a god might view them, as acontextual essences
which are what they are apart from the uses to which they are put, but as
terms within a larger train of thought or discursive vocabulary, and which, to
be understood, must be so regarded. Whether it is the philosopher theoriz-
ing on the nature of time or justice, or the philosophy professor providing
instruction on the same, reflective thought that proceeds by removing the
concept from all context and connections with other concepts, with its
history, etymology, and variety of uses in different fields of inquiry and expe-
rience – except perhaps as a secondary matter or for purposes of illustration
– is a project destined for failure. We neither experience nor reflect upon
intentional objects of any kind – philosophical concepts, scientific hypothe-
ses, empirical objects, or what have you – as disconnected atoms but by
regarding an object in organic relation to a context of thought and experi-
ence. In Dewey’s view it is the ‘neglect of context’ that constitutes ‘the most
pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking’, a habit of thought that is as old
as the Greeks and as contemporary as certain forms of ‘analysis’.40
Reflection upon an idea, then, involves locating it within a train of thought
or argumentative sequence that importantly includes a ‘con-sequence – a
What Is Called Thinking? 115
consecutive ordering [of ideas] in such a way that each determines the next
as its proper outcome’. In reflective thinking, as in the experience with
which it is concerned, one thing leads to another; an idea or object is com-
prehended by relating it to a purpose, a history, a different idea or object, by
identifying that to which it leads, or otherwise by drawing it into association
with something else, and not simply providing an inventory of its properties
or component parts. This of course includes a critical examination of its
justificatory rationale, yet in a sense that is not limited to formal reasoning.
In How We Think, Dewey identified three differences between formal reason-
ing in the sense of logical deduction and ‘thinking as it actually goes on in
the mind of any person’.41 Whereas the former is as perfectly impersonal as
mathematics, the latter is contingent on the intellectual habits of the thinker
– whether the individual is attentive or inattentive, careful or careless, disci-
plined or undisciplined. Second, while logical argument forms are unchang-
ing and unconcerned with the content that fills them, thought is a process
that changes with some regularity and is forever taking account of its object
and trying to resolve difficulties without creating new ones. As well, formal
reasoning is indifferent to context while for reflective thought the larger
context of resolving problematic situations must remain uppermost in view.
These differences notwithstanding, reflective intelligence as Dewey con-
ceived of it is as concerned with the rational basis of belief as what conven-
tionally goes under the name of logical inference.
Dewey’s conception of reflective thought also includes the notion of
understanding, and in a sense of this term that anticipates developments in
the phenomenological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and later German
and French thinkers working under his influence (as I shall discuss later in
this chapter). If pragmatic inquiry as Dewey described it is a properly social
undertaking, so too is the practice of understanding which is intimately
related to reflection. Although Dewey would not write at great length about
the concept of understanding itself – certainly not providing the elaborate
phenomenological account of the kind articulated by Heidegger or
Gadamer – he did speak of understanding and its synonym, comprehension,
in a very short essay of 1929 as
A few years later he would again describe understanding as ‘an agreement or set-
tlement of some affair’ between persons, hence in an explicitly intersubjective
116 The Educative Process
offers than for ‘clinging to problems’ of old and often merely translating
centuries-old problems into new vocabularies rather than resolving or dis-
solving them. Meanwhile the ‘[d]irect preoccupation with contemporary
difficulties is left to literature and politics’.55
Other disciplines received a similar assessment from Dewey, the common
denominator being that the ‘[s]cholastic specialization’ and compartmen-
talization of research in all fields ‘breed indifference to larger social issues
and objects’ and produce scholars who are ‘socially isolated and socially irre-
sponsible’, and who exhibit ‘more than usually poor judgment in matters not
closely allied’ to their field of expertise.56 The weddedness of research to the
university produces educational practices that reproduce such traits within
students more often than instilling the intellectual virtues and habits of mind
that for Dewey are the marks of an educated mind. Reflective thought in
particular is hampered by overspecialization, its orientation being toward
precisely that which all scholasticism overlooks: the connections between dif-
ferent domains of experience, the consequences of ideas and theoretical
constructions for our practices, the larger contextuality of understanding,
and the inventive quality at the heart of all inquiry.
Pedagogical matters
We thus arrive at an answer to the question posed in the title of this chapter.
The defining features of thinking in Dewey’s expansive sense of the term
include an orientation toward the experiential and the problematic, an
experimental frame of mind that is modeled on scientific inquiry while also
being reflective, imaginative, and hospitable to new ideas, which seeks depth
of understanding and a breadth of interests, and above all that demonstrates
a concern for resolving difficulties within human affairs rather than theoriz-
ing in the spirit of scholastic formalism. What thinking is not includes
amassing information in the largest possible quantity, following rules or for-
malist methods, an inculcation of beliefs, or a faculty of mind that is isolated
from subject matter. Thought is a methodological enterprise, yet one that
more closely resembles ordinary trial and error than formal logic in the
non-pragmatic connotation of the term.
Accordingly, if the business of education crucially bears upon the art of
thinking or what is called ‘critical thinking’, as so many currently profess and
as Dewey himself maintained, what pedagogical recommendations did he
provide for educators charged with teaching this art? How does one teach
another to think, recognizing that the answer will depend significantly on
the students’ level of intellectual maturity as well as the subject matter?
Clearly, if pragmatic intelligence is an essentially social and co-operative
form of inquiry, a fair proportion of class time will be occupied with informal
What Is Called Thinking? 121
There are still, however, large portions of society which have not come to
recognize that biology is an established science, and which, therefore,
cannot concede to it the right to determine belief in regions that conflict
with received opinions, and with the emotions that cluster about them.63
Twenty years later Dewey would speak in similarly critical terms of the Lusk
laws in New York state which required teachers to take loyalty oaths in light
of the red scare of the day. Speaking in an interview, Dewey remarked:
measures as the Lusk laws. However such laws may be defended from the
standpoint of public comfort, they do not permit us to educate our
children. Their tendency is to make of them a lot of well-trained apes.64
While no formal method teaches the art of thinking, there are conditions
that educators must guard against, from indoctrination to prohibitions on
certain ideas or regimes of belief, an undue compartmentalization of
thought, directionless activity, intellectual irresponsibility, and also excessive
formality in the classroom.65 As for more precise pedagogical recommenda-
tions regarding how thought or the intellectual virtues that Dewey esteemed
are best taught and learned, Dewey was often surprisingly circumspect apart
from some very general remarks. On the subject of lecturing, for example,
Dewey stated very briefly that while he regarded lecturing as indispensable,
where the question of ‘the best method of lecturing’ is concerned, ‘I can
only say that I have been wrestling with the problem for some years, and have
been regretfully forced to the conclusion that the best way a man can, is the
best way for him to lecture.’ Providing direct instruction is far superior, in his
view, to ‘the text-book fetish’ and ‘superstition’ according to which human
knowledge may be presented to students in ready-made form as so much
information to be amassed.66 Lecturing being an art rather than a technique,
there is little by way of positive guidance or formalizable rules that can be
devised. What it is essentially is a skill in presenting information or ideas
regarding a given field of inquiry in a fashion that leads the students into
engaging the inquiry in their own consciousness and in common discussion.
What lecturing is not is a method of ‘pouring knowledge into a mental and
moral hole which awaits filling’.67 Its aim, as with educational practices in
general, is to contribute to the students’ intellectual growth, and thus must
be thought of more as a processual matter than the achievement of a specific
end-state.
Much the same applies to the issue of assigning grades. The ‘evil’ that
marks represent is owing to their intrinsic nature of imposing quantitative
measure on what is a properly qualitative matter – the students’ acquisition
of intellectual habits that approximate thinking.68 While the straightforward
acquisition of information may be easily quantified, with grades determined
by means of traditional examination, the ‘things of the spirit’, as Dewey
expressed it, ‘do not lend themselves easily to exact quantitative measure’.69
Where they are unavoidable, grades should be regarded as something of a
necessary evil or, in any event, ‘a minor matter’ rather than the ultimate goal
of learning, as they are so often regarded today. What education ultimately
demands of students is no different from what experience itself requires of
us all: very simply that the student ‘do absolutely the best that he can under
all circumstances’ and let the grades be what they will. Since there is no telos
124 The Educative Process
in the educative process save for more education, the only measure of
success is whether students have developed a facility with the subject matter
which allows them to pursue further study, to carry a line of thought further,
or in general whether they have derived from a course what is derivable from
it. To substitute for this the standard of passing or of achieving a certain
grade, such as the ‘false and demoralizing standard’ that is the class average,
sets the bar entirely too low and over time accustoms students to expect little
of themselves in other areas of life as well.70
Dewey’s assessment of the importance or ultimate unimportance of
grades, as he pointed out, is often faulted for itself setting too low a standard
and for promoting a ‘soft pedagogy’ that fails both to reward achievement
and to discourage undesirable intellectual habits. His reply that ‘the exact
contrary holds’ stems from his belief that stressing the qualitative over the
quantitative and process over end-states, while unusual in modern culture,
better captures the meaning of education while also being a more demand-
ing task for educators and students alike.71 Students who achieve a relatively
high grade are given to believe that they are where they need to be and may
therefore rest on their laurels while it is those at the bottom end who have
more learning to do. Where the art of thinking is concerned, one is never
entirely where one needs to be.
phenomena and account for our various experiences, ideas that may be
revised should a new experience contradict a previous conviction.
Dewey was still clearer in this regard, carefully avoiding James’ occasional
casualness of expression while insisting on the circumscription of terms such
as ‘satisfaction’ and ‘practical interests’ to the immediate object of inquiry:
Too often . . . when truth has been thought of as satisfaction, it has been
thought of as merely emotional satisfaction, a private comfort, a meeting
of purely personal need. But the satisfaction in question means a satisfac-
tion of the needs and conditions of the problem out of which the idea, the
purpose and method of action, arises. . . . Again when truth is defined as
utility, it is often thought to mean utility for some purely personal end,
some profit upon which a particular individual has set his heart. . . . As a
matter of fact, truth as utility means service in making just that contribu-
tion to reorganization in experience that the idea or theory claims to be
able to make. The usefulness of a road is not measured by the degree in
which it lends itself to the purposes of a highwayman. It is measured by
whether it actually functions as a road, as a means of easy and effective
public transportation and communication. And so with the serviceable-
ness of an idea or hypothesis as a measure of its truth.75
1930, ‘has left a permanent deposit in my thinking’, would turn his back res-
olutely on German thought in particular – partly, again, for obvious political
reasons but partly for reasons more philosophical.76
Like so many Anglo-American assessments of German thought in the early
decades of the twentieth century, Dewey’s assessment emphasized the con-
nections that he believed he saw between German philosophy from
Immanuel Kant onward and German culture more generally, including in
particular the political culture that culminated in Hitler. Already in 1915,
Dewey would write in a short book titled German Philosophy and Politics
(undoubtedly not one of his more impressive achievements) that ‘there is no
people so hostile to the spirit of a pragmatic philosophy’ as the Germans and
that ‘supreme regard for the inner meaning of things, reverence for inner
truth in disregard of external consequences of advantage or disadvantage, is
the distinguishing mark of the German spirit’.77 Well prior to Hitler and
indeed to the First World War, Dewey would adopt such a dim view of
German philosophy’s antipragmatic bent toward the spiritual, the transcen-
dental, the romantic, and the a priori, and away from the practical and polit-
ical consequences of ideas that the German thinkers of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries with whom Dewey had a good deal in common
would remain ignored and usually unread by him (and he did possess
reading knowledge of German). The 38 volumes that comprise Dewey’s
collected works contain not a single reference, for instance, to either Husserl
or Heidegger, and it does appear that he did not read them. Even Dewey’s
acquaintance with Nietzsche’s thought was surprisingly superficial and
largely second-hand, the references to his works very few and passing. Still
more surprising perhaps is the thesis of German Philosophy and Politics that it
is none other than Kant who bore ultimate responsibility for the lamentable
state of German political consciousness at the outbreak of the First World
War due to his rigid separation of nature from the higher realm of spirit, the
things in themselves, the will, and moral duty, and due as well to his
dichotomy of reason and experience and his anti-consequentialist fanaticism
regarding the categorical imperative.
By the early twentieth century Dewey had come to view European culture
ever more as ‘the Old World’ – more especially continental Europe, ‘and
Germany in particular’ – in contrast to which American culture and
American philosophy needed to assert itself. Two world wars, of course, did
nothing to reverse his view, such that by 1944 he would remark that America
must regard itself no longer as ‘an offshoot of Europe, culturally speaking’,
but ‘as a New World in other than a geographical sense’. If the New World
did not yet rival the Old in terms of artistic achievement, it was rapidly
gaining ground in scientific advancement and in philosophical thought still
more. ‘Philosophy’, he now asserted, ‘needed to be taken out of the hands
128 The Educative Process
But how dare anyone assert today that we are still not thinking, today
when there is everywhere a lively and constantly more audible interest in
130 The Educative Process
Myth means the telling word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and
make appear. . . . Mythos is what has its essence in its telling – what is
apparent in the unconcealedness of its appeal. The mythos is that appeal
of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man
think of what appears, what is in being. Logos says the same; mythos and
logos are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into
opposition by philosophy as such; on the contrary, the early Greek
thinkers are precisely the ones to use mythos and logos in the same sense.91
demands much of us or even has its way with us, so to speak, even as it
remains our own thought, one that does not think itself. In a sense it is
perfectly true that the cabinet-maker responds to the wood and the poet
responds to language. It is equally true that wood and language do not form
themselves. But what Heidegger’s phenomenological account adds to
Dewey’s is that were we less beholden to science and technology we might
better understand the simultaneously active, experimental or form-bestowing
as well as the passive, responsive, or transformative dimension of thinking. To
think is not to preside over being.
I would like to conclude this chapter with a few remarks concerning
thought in either Dewey’s or Heidegger’s sense of the word, and certain con-
ditions of the present time, both social and educational, that are less than
conducive to the manner of thinking of which these philosophers spoke.
Heidegger’s ominous-sounding words, ‘we are still not thinking’, ring about
as true today as they did when he pronounced them, and not only in the
sense that he intended but in Dewey’s sense and some others. Our class-
rooms are still not inquiring, nor are they imparting habits of mind that lead
students into a deeper examination of their experience. After decades of
research into curriculum, the psychology of the young, and pedagogical
methodology, students of today appear no more inclined toward reflective-
ness, in whatever sense of the word one prefers, than they ever did, if indeed
they are not still more fascinated by the outward and superficial. A mind that
is fashioned within an order of technology, calculation, and performativity,
of standardized information and standardized testing, learns to follow rules.
According to widespread belief, it was in the olden days – whenever we
imagine these to be – that students were conscripted into ways of thinking
that were conformist and oppressive while today students are thinking for
themselves, critically and scientifically. Educational research has made this
possible, and but for the interference of the unlearned it would produce a
generation of critical thinkers with profitable careers and enviable self-
esteem. Science too has its mythology. When thought in general is reduced
to a single form, abolishing the remainder, the educated mind becomes
adapted to techniques and expects to find rules and methods governing all
aspects of its existence. It looks to, and readily finds, a special class of experts
who are the guardians of such techniques, and it submits to their instruction
as fervently as in any olden days of educational authoritarianism. The author-
ities and the rules of thought may both have changed, but this matters
less than the thoughtlessness that remains the outcome of contemporary
education.
The thoughtlessness of our times undoubtedly assumes a different form
than in the past. The variety of this that was the focus of Dewey’s criticism has
been replaced by standardization and an inauthentic scientification of the
140 The Educative Process
fashioned reading of books signed out from a library but for its superior
efficiency. Thinking as gaining quick access to highly simplified, abbreviated,
and predigested information coupled with a bit of computerized cutting and
pasting – a process that for many a student passes quite satisfactorily for
thinking – is, I would suggest, not the genuine article. If Heidegger had good
cause to remark in 1959 that ‘[t]he world now appears as an object open to
the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any
longer to resist’, it may now appear as so much information on a computer
screen, purified of unnecessary detail, complexity, precision, imagination,
and style.93 Why go to the trouble, many now reason, of plowing through
Being and Time, with its difficult prose and complex argumentation, when
one can access websites that have boiled down all the necessary information
to a paragraph in plain English? Why read War and Peace with its long-winded
chapters in which nothing happens, when one can find plot summaries with
thematic analysis sufficient for any examination? Questions of this kind are
now asked in earnest, not embarrassment, and not only by the lean-minded.
Were thinking one day to disappear from the face of the earth it would be
due far less to intellectual laziness than to a want of opportunities for its
exercise, to the simple lack of need for it due to an iron cage of calculative
rationality, performativity, and standardization containing one and all. This
day is not at hand, yet deeply rooted social and educational conditions of our
times are reducing rather than increasing opportunities for the kind of
thinking of which Dewey and Heidegger both spoke, trends that see thinking
in the classroom either as a simple matter of being informed or as an idle
luxury, thinking in the workplace as an obstacle to efficiency, thinking in
ordinary conversation as an affectation, and thinking in solitude as evidence
of mental disturbance.
Heidegger was correct: ‘We are still not thinking.’ He did exaggerate the
point; we are thinking, but in too restricted a capacity, and we are losing sight
of the need or even the possibility of thinking differently. Dewey was correct
as well: thought is experimental. Yet it is experimental in a way or to a degree
that Dewey did not see. Experimentation includes the incalculable, the
metaphorical and the questioning, the mysterious and open-ended. Not
everything that counts as thinking can be made to fit a single model, nor is
every intelligent course of thought a problem to be solved. Much as we have
always sought, and will no doubt continue seeking, to codify thinking, to
reduce it to a system of rules and thus call it to order, it remains that thinking
itself, most especially in its higher reaches and its inventive capacity, has a
way of leaving the rules behind. Our impatient culture may long for the
ready solution and the measurable outcome, for the self-certainty and ease
of mind that technical models often promise, but much of this is an illusion.
There is not always a code to be cracked, and if we would speak of thinking
142 The Educative Process
as it is, then we must speak of it as an art that sometimes draws upon abstract
methods of one kind or another and sometimes does not.
Notes
1. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 160.
2. Dewey, How We Think (rev. edn, 1933). LW 8: 315.
3. Dewey, ‘The Need for Orientation’ (1935). LW 11: 164. ‘Philosophies of Freedom’
(1928). LW 3: 112.
4. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929). LW 4: 179.
5. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 121.
6. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 152.
7. Ibid., 165.
8. Dewey, ‘The Challenge of Democracy to Education’ (1937). LW 11: 185.
9. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 159.
10. As Dewey expressed this point: ‘Thus the tenets of political and economic liberal faith
are made the criterion of a liberal education and mind. And here also it may be stated
that even if these views are sound, the mark of a liberal mind is not that they are held,
but is the way in which they are reached and accepted.’ Dewey, ‘The Prospects of the
Liberal College’ (1924). MW 15: 203.
11. See, for instance, Dewey, ‘Bankruptcy of Modern Education’ (1927). LW 3: 277.
12. One representative passage reads: ‘But the child who has been most perfectly trained
as to conduct, the one who acts in every way as he is told to act and even holds the
opinions which he is told to hold, is quite apt not to be educated at all. He may make
a good soldier, he may make a “good citizen”, in the sense that he may be depended
upon not to murder or steal, not to drink, swear, gamble, or get married too often:
but such a person may only be trained; he may not be educated at all. It is quite
possible that he cannot think.’ Charles W. Wood, ‘Report of Interview with John
Dewey’ (1922). MW 13: 428.
13. For an analysis of the pragmatist theory of truth, see Chapter 2 in my Theorizing Praxis:
Studies in Hermeneutical Pragmatism (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), in which I defend
this theory in its Jamesian and Deweyan formulations and bring it into conversation
with the hermeneutical conception of truth articulated by Martin Heidegger and
Hans-Georg Gadamer.
14. Dewey, ‘Preface’ to Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 4. See William James,
Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
15. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 144.
16. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958),
400.
17. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 144.
18. Dewey, ‘The Challenge of Democracy to Education’ (1937). LW 11: 184.
19. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929). LW 4: 200.
20. Dewey made explicit the point concerning the methods of the natural sciences not
being transferrable to humanistic inquiry in a footnote to an essay from 1949: ‘The
word “methods” is italicized as a precaution against a possible misunderstanding
which would be contrary to what is intended. What is needed is not the carrying over
of procedures that have approved themselves in physical science, but new methods as
adapted to human issues and problems, as methods already in scientific use have
shown themselves to be in physical subject matter.’ Dewey, ‘Philosophy’s Future in our
Scientific Age: Never Was Its Role More Crucial’ (1949). LW 16: 379.
21. Dewey, ‘Science as Subject Matter and as Method’ (1910). MW 6: 78. A few passages
What Is Called Thinking? 143
Teaching Philosophy:
The Scholastic and the Thinker
From the time in the early modern era when philosophers became gradually
absorbed into the university to become the new breed of academic profes-
sional that is the secular professor of philosophy, there is no area of practice
with which philosophers have been more intimately acquainted in our
nine-to-five existences than the practice of education. Since roughly the
eighteenth century, philosophers in the main have been university educa-
tors, a consideration that one might expect would cause more of us to
inquire into the principles and conditions of this practice than has in fact
been the case. Like other matters of social philosophy, the question of
education is a topic on which philosophy professors, irrespective of our field
of specialization, believe ourselves eminently qualified to pronounce an
opinion, yet beyond the bounds of university politics and our own classroom
we typically elect to hold our peace and to leave the matter for administra-
tors and education department faculties to sort out among themselves. His-
torically speaking, this is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the era of
professionalization, and especially prior to the twentieth century, the great
philosophers of the Western tradition have typically had a great deal to say
on the subject, quite apart from whether they were educators themselves or
not. Thus Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes,
Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, and a great
many others all made important contributions to the philosophy of educa-
tion, while in more recent times philosophers have been somewhat more
reticent on this matter than might have been expected. So much so, in fact,
that in the educational literature of the past century the philosophers of
note who stand out as exceptions do so rather prominently: Alfred North
Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and – a philosopher never known for reticence
– Dewey stand out notably among major philosophers of the twentieth
century for their writings in the philosophy of education.
When we look back to the Greeks, of course, we find the connection
between the love of wisdom and a preoccupation with education to be far
from accidental. Plato’s lengthy discussion in the Republic of the kind of
education that the guardian class and the philosopher-king should receive is
hardly a secondary issue in Plato’s conception of the just state, nor is the
149
150 Education in the Human Sciences
question of education ultimately separable for Aristotle and many other clas-
sical thinkers from one of philosophy’s most basic concerns: the nature of
the good life. If the human being’s essential nature is its rationality – its pos-
session of the logos – then the good life is the life that is proper to a rational
being: the life of disinterested contemplation, of scientific, mathematical, or
philosophical study. From the beginning, then, the fate of philosophy was
inseparable from the fate of education, while the ‘educational enterprise’, in
Dewey’s words, ‘was regarded as the systematic means by which the good life
was to be arrived at and maintained: the life full, excellent, rich, for the indi-
vidual center of that life, and the life good for the community of which the
individual was a member’.1 Philosophy’s original connection with education
was indeed part of a broader association of the love of wisdom with the
conduct of life, with a wider outlook on the natural and human world, and
ultimately with social aims, as the example of Plato well illustrates. It is not
an accident of history that Plato founded the Academy or Aristotle the
Lyceum, nor were these schools created as a secondary or unphilosophical
undertaking. Instead they were to form the proper abode of philosophy itself
and to put into practice the cultivation of wisdom and the intellectual virtues
that defined both education and the best way of life for rational beings.
Dewey’s philosophy of education in many ways represents a continuation
of this Greek ideal, modified of course to suit modern conditions but con-
tinuing the idea that the ultimate aims of education transcend the acquisi-
tion of information or technical skill to include the business of thinking itself
– the cultivation of intellectual capacity, the fashioning of ideas, and the
resolution of whatever problems beset a society. Where there is genuine
education, and genuine philosophy, the two are vitally connected not only to
each other but to the urgent social questions of the day, to the fate of democ-
racy and the condition of the culture of which one is a part.
Today, however, in the era of professionalization and specialization the
philosophy of education has become a relatively marginal subdiscipline
within what is termed ‘applied’ or ‘social philosophy’, where ‘applied’ and
‘social’ are contrasted with the ostensibly ‘core’ branches of philosophy –
metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language – while within
social philosophy itself the theory of education most often takes a back seat
to ethics and political theory. Despite its impressive pedigree in Greek
thought and the ensuing tradition, and despite the burgeoning literature in
the field that has emerged in recent decades, the theory of education has
been effectively demoted to a minor specialty within the contemporary
philosophy profession. This is reflected in the course offerings of philosophy
departments at the present time, where seminars at the graduate level are
seldom offered in this field while at the undergraduate level perhaps as many
as a single course is taught, most often as a ‘service’ course attended mainly
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 151
complete agreement with the sentiments they express – is a short essay from
1891 entitled ‘The Scholastic and the Speculator’. This remarkable text finds
Dewey comparing the philosophical specialists of the day with the scholastics
of the Middle Ages. Where the medieval schoolmen had abstracted Aristotle
from any living connection with Greek culture and in the zeal for a system
treated his texts in a purely formal and contextless fashion, when the scholas-
tics ‘had suffocated Aristotle by removing him from the conditions of life’
and then ‘proceeded to dismember the remains’, so the philosopher of the
present inquires into an object by tearing it out of its context and analyzing
it, proffering cut-and-dried definitions, drawing razor-thin distinctions, and
engaging in what appears to all the world to be purely formal and verbal
exercises. Dewey continued:
Even the miser, I suppose, has to do something with his gold, or else he
wouldn’t know he had it. He must count it over, he must jingle it together,
he must bury his fingers in it and roll the coins about. So the Scholastic
had to use his learning in some way. He pulled it this way and pulled it that
until he pulled it all to pieces. When anything is abstracted, when it is
taken off by itself, having lost its connections, all that remains is to go over
and over the same thing, dissecting, dividing, analyzing, and then sorting
out and piling up the fragments. Distinction-making and collecting always
accompany the scholastic habit.
The reflective object’s very life consists in its contextuality and organic
connections with other objects and processes, yet this is precisely what is lost
sight of when the primary business of thinking consists of an abstraction and
analysis that at the end of the day fails to return to the world of experience
and the object’s ‘place in the movement of life’. Modern philosophy, far
from putting an end to the scholastics’ ways, instead gives them different
form and a far broader range of application. Where the schoolmen were
limited to the texts of Aristotle and the Scriptures, the specialists of modern
times may turn their gaze in any direction, toward the entire domain of
thought and language. As he continued,
The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass
of ‘authorities’ have taken the place of Aristotle. Jahresberichte, monographs,
journals without end occupy the void left by the commentators upon Aris-
totle. If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing
from old manuscripts in order to indite thereon something of his own, the
new Scholastic has also his palimpsest. He criticizes the criticisms with
which some other Scholastic has criticized other criticisms, and the writing
upon writings goes on till the substructure of reality is long obscured.5
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 153
Russell’s logical atomism and the new logical positivism that had its begin-
nings in the Vienna Circle both placed philosophical thought within such
narrow confines as to lose connection with the vital world of human
concerns and became a purely formal exercise. As philosophy turns its back
on the world, the latter responds in kind or looks with bewildered incom-
prehension upon the ‘barren intellectual gymnastic exercise and purely
verbal analyses’ that are passed off as problems.10 The new analytic rational-
ism’s propensity for technicality, formality, and hair-splitting was, in Dewey’s
estimation, so remote from philosophy’s proper purpose and grounding in
154 Education in the Human Sciences
directing this critique in the direction of any specific field, Dewey argued
that education in general prepares students for future life only ‘in a certain
sense’ and that preparation for a specialized profession is not its central
purpose:
While the educator in philosophy or in any discipline must take the students’
future into account, this must not be interpreted in a narrow or purely
instrumental way, as happens when undergraduate education is regarded as
the training that is a necessary prelude to becoming a specialist, be it as an
academic philosopher or in another field of professional life. The conven-
tional and still prevalent view that an education in philosophy or in anything
must be good for some end outside of the educative process itself is, of
course, a view that Dewey rejected, even while acknowledging the obvious
practical value of a university education. He rejected as well the notion of
higher learning as a preparation for entry into a cultural aristocracy of sorts.
The ‘theoretic type of education’ that philosophy provides and which its
‘upholders always defend . . . on the ground of “culture” and “liberal,”
“humanistic” education’, Dewey remarked, ‘has prevailed almost entirely in
the schools aiming to produce “gentlemen” in the English conventional
sense – that is, members of the ruling and leisure class’.14 To maintain that a
theoretical education, while a good, is ‘not good for anything’ – a prepar-
ation for a career as a specialist, an initiation into the elite, a stepping stone
to law school – is to assert that its instrumental value is not its ultimate end
but is subordinate to ends of a less tangible nature.15 Insofar as an education
in philosophy prepares students for anything, what it prepares them for is
to be competent democratic citizens and to possess the intellectual virtues
that are needed to participate in forms of community life that transcend
economic labor. Ever mindful of the properly democratic spirit of education,
Dewey adamantly opposed the division of students into those destined for
‘an academic life of leisure and culture’ and those who are being prepared
for the ‘somewhat passive and dulled participation in unidealized labor’.16
156 Education in the Human Sciences
This class-based conception breeds docility of mind in the latter group and
an Old World elitism in the former.
Perhaps Dewey’s most direct answer to the question of the aims of an
undergraduate education in philosophy is one that he outlined in a very
brief essay of 1893, appropriately entitled ‘Why Study Philosophy?’ Address-
ing a student audience, he answered his own question by stating the impor-
tance of knowing the origins and basis of current ideas, a knowledge that
enables students to gain facility with ideas and at times to ‘free ourselves
from them’. If ideas are instruments for resolving problematic situations
rather than components of a creed, the educated mind must be proficient in
their use rather than uncritical or deferential. In his words,
I am not here to magnify my calling unduly, but I feel that one who has
done what is termed ‘completing his education’ without an insight on his
own behalf into the processes historical, logical, psychological, by which
the present structure of ideas and of emotions and volitional attitudes, has
been brought into existence has an outlook, at once narrow and rigid,
upon a field monotonous, of hard and fast perspective, of fixed horizon,
while he might, relatively at least, be looking with wide and flexible vision
upon a scene of melting hues, of playing lights, shifting limits.
student of today assess their arguments or create new ones through the
straightforward application of technique. The error of many a philosophy
professor, Dewey believed, is to reproduce in students’ minds the traditional
series of binary oppositions – between reason and experience, the a priori
and the a posteriori, theory and practice, thought and emotion, form and
content, knowledge and opinion, certainty and probability, and so on – and
to insist that the serious business of the intellectual is the former value in
each of these polarities while the latter values represent so much watering
down of the ideal. The consequences of this include the distorted view that
students receive regarding how philosophers think and ought to think, as
well as a dangerous disconnection between ‘logical thought, as something
abstract and remote, and the specific and concrete demands of everyday
events’. More ultimately, these consequences go beyond the narrowly intel-
lectual to encompass the practical and the ethical: ‘The gullibility of special-
ized scholars when out of their own lines, their extravagant habits of
inference and speech, their ineptness in reaching conclusions in practical
matters, their egotistical engrossment in their own subjects’ are a few of the
effects that the severing of thought from experience produces, and among
students quite as much as their educators.21
One of the vital matters in a philosophical education, as in philosophy
itself, is the set of problems with which it deals and the origin of these
problems. When the professor of epistemology informs his or her students
that there is a problem regarding the existence of the world, or of other
minds, the students quite possibly require convincing as to the genuineness
of the problem. How, they might be forgiven for asking, does this problem
arise? Why is this a problem? Before inquiry into solutions gets under way,
these elementary questions must be answered, yet unanswered or even un-
addressed they often remain. The zeal for answers easily inclines us to
overlook the worthiness of the question, however as Dewey pointed out, this
seemingly elementary matter is all-important for the inquiry that follows.
Learning requires a motivation, a degree of curiosity or desire, as does
thinking itself. If an educator can often instill this simply through the force
of his or her own enthusiasm for the subject, it remains that for education to
succeed, students must have a sense that the problems they are studying are
not pseudo-problems or puzzles on which to sharpen their wits. The ‘great
questions’ with which they are presented must be regarded by the students
themselves as living and urgent questions rather than ostensibly perennial
ones which, as the professor informs them, simply arise whenever the human
mind sets about to think, or that perhaps fall from the sky.
When Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education that ‘a peculiar artificiality
attaches to much of what is learned in schools’, he may well have had in
mind a great deal of the curriculum that is offered by departments of
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 159
course with the word ‘issues’ in its title rather than ‘theory’ is thought by
many students looking for an easy elective to be a promising candidate and
perhaps to have a more immediate appeal than the theoretical course. There
may be more to the story, however, than what the conventional wisdom
captures. A course in moral issues or in a branch of applied ethics will often
connect with a student’s experience and existing interests far more readily
than a course in ethical theory. Students will often bring a high level of
interest to such a course, and an interest that is sustained even after it
becomes apparent that the course is not as easy as they had anticipated. If a
majority of such students are reluctant subsequently to study ethical theory,
this is more likely due to its perceived irrelevance to practical issues than its
advanced level of difficulty or sophistication. The demand for ‘relevance’ so
often heard from students may not (or not only) be the symptom of mis-
guided anti-intellectualism that their educators often take it to be, but in part
a legitimate expectation that the theoretical will help us to cope with the
practical and also a complaint about the disconnection between experience
and education that they so often perceive.
Is ‘making it relevant’ a legitimate expectation when so much of the philo-
sophical curriculum consists essentially of intellectual history? If one is
teaching Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’ Leviathan, does it not suffice to teach the
argument of the text, to elucidate its meaning in the traditional manner, and
perhaps engage in some critical analysis? Must one relate the text to the
students’ personal experience – a matter that is customarily regarded as
pedestrian or at best a preliminary issue to be dispensed with as quickly as
possible in order to get to the essential business of the argument? For that
matter, under what conditions is teaching the history of ideas properly
educative at all? What is the point of this, and is it ever mis-educative?
Dewey’s response to this line of questioning is that connecting the great
works of the past to the students’ present-day experience is both a legitimate
expectation and a necessary condition of it having educational value at all.
Reading such works does not resemble a visit to a museum in which priceless
antiques are carefully roped off by the educator while students are com-
pelled to gaze in appreciative passivity at the wonders within the roped-off
area. On the contrary, learning the great works means engaging with them,
and in a sense that is not limited to inspecting the logic of their arguments
or engaging in what philosophers in a certain tradition call ‘analysis’.
Genuinely to engage with the Republic is to have one’s horizon widened and
one’s convictions tested, to comprehend one of the sources of Western
culture not as an end in itself but, as Dewey put it, ‘in order that the current
may receive a new direction’.27 Ultimately, the justification and relevance of
studying intellectual history is no different from the study of history in its
other forms: to enable us the better to cope with the present and the future.
162 Education in the Human Sciences
have for studying the writings of Descartes or Hobbes, for example, than to
see how philosophers have previously negotiated in thought the transition
from one age to the next? Many of the philosophers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, of course, as many of more recent times, were well
aware of the historical transition in which they stood and regarded it as the
philosopher’s task both to interpret what this new era fundamentally signi-
fies and to provide it with intelligent direction. The capacity of students to
take up a similar reflection is likely doomed to failure or superficiality if they
lack adequate knowledge of such efforts and of intellectual history more
generally.
Dewey defended a few additional principles that readily apply to the
teaching of philosophy, although once again his own applications usually
focused on education at more elementary levels than the university. As we
have seen, a basic principle of Dewey’s is that the classroom constitutes a
‘special environment’ which is distinguished from other environments in
that everything within it is purposefully arranged with a view to promoting
intellectual growth. Dewey went so far as to argue that ‘we never educate
directly’ but rather ‘indirectly by means of the environment’.31 We can
readily imagine how this applies in the primary school, where activities and
materials in general are ordered with an educative purpose in mind, but how
does the same principle apply at the post-secondary level to philosophy?
What are the conditions of a proper ‘learning environment’ in the seminar
room or lecture theater of the modern university? Again without ever asking
this specific question, Dewey did provide a general direction by speaking of
an educational environment as one that leaves students and educators at
liberty to propose and test ideas in free discussion, that widens horizons,
challenges received beliefs, and practices inquiry without fear of repercus-
sions that often follow outside of an academic environment from challeng-
ing orthodoxy or established taboos of thought. The ideal of freedom is so
central to any properly educational environment that, as Dewey put it, the
‘one great obstacle’ to intellectual growth, widespread during Dewey’s time
and our own, is ‘that there is a region of beliefs, social, religious, and politi-
cal, which is reserved for sheer acceptance and where unbiased inquiry
should not intrude’.32 In the philosophy classroom of today we continue to
have our intellectual orthodoxies which students are forbidden to challenge,
whether it be the political correctness orthodoxy of recent decades or the
professor’s own views, both of which students are often keenly aware and by
which they are often intimidated. It remains a common occurrence for
students who allude in class discussion or written work to a philosopher to
whom the professor is not well disposed to be informed with an air of author-
ity that the philosopher in question ‘is not a philosopher’, but perhaps a
sophist or a charlatan. An equally common phenomenon is, of course, the
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 165
One thing, then, that a University should do for a man is to rid him of his
provincialisms. We all – or almost all – of us come out from a sphere of life
somewhat narrower than that into which we come. The question is
whether in this emergence we come out of our shells, or bring them with
us. Certainly the boy or girl who comes to college judging all things from
the standpoint of the way they think and do ‘in my place’, ought to have
his horizon of outlook pushed out a little further, and his standard of
measurement lengthened.33
discussion. The educator’s role here is neither to play the expert, and so
close off the conversation, nor merely to pass the microphone from one talk-
show spectator to the next, but is rather something intermediate between
the two or, better still, that represents a higher synthesis. Their role, as Dewey
would often insist, is to direct the conversation along fruitful avenues,
allowing it neither to deteriorate in level or tone, lose focus, or to become
one-sided or dominated by too few students. The educator’s task also
includes giving direction to class discussion and ensuring that what Dewey
called ‘the spirit of inquiry’ prevails. How this is done in terms of pedagogi-
cal technique is decidedly secondary to the intellectual frame of mind that
the educator brings to the subject matter and to the discussion, since this
attitude so often becomes infectious, for better or worse, among the
students. For Dewey, one of the main features that distinguishes the highly
competent educator from the ordinary one, entirely aside from their level of
expertise or ability to apply the latest findings of pedagogical science, is the
less tangible matter of their comportment toward inquiry itself. As he
expressed this point,
If this is not good news for pedagogical science, it is well familiar to anyone
who recalls from their own student days those, perhaps few, educators who
embodied this ‘spirit of inquiry’ to an optimal degree and inspired our own
intellectual efforts or guided our interests in a new direction.
The professor’s role in the classroom, of course, is not limited to inspir-
ation or embodying the intellectual virtues that he or she would instill, but
also involves direct instruction and lecturing on the subject matter, more or
less in the traditional manner, while also ensuring that the general discussion
remains faithful to standards of rational discourse. It is not a conversational
free-for-all that Dewey advocated, but the very practice of pragmatic inquiry
and social intelligence that he described in his logical and epistemological
writings carried over to the classroom. Since class discussion exhibits a
certain ‘haphazard’ quality which, as Dewey remarked, ‘gives it the devious
tendency indicated in Plato’s remark that it needs to be tied to the post of
reason’, it falls to the professor to keep matters on the rails and direct
attention toward the philosophical basis of whatever assertions are made.36 If
students do not arrive at the university as blank slates, but possess a wide
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 167
range of beliefs which they have acquired this way or that and which they
may or may not have explicitly articulated, classroom discussion provides
perhaps the most effective means of drawing out the students’ ideas, and
where this involves not only giving such ideas public expression but subject-
ing them to scrutiny by their peers.
Ultimately, the purpose of a philosophical education on Dewey’s view is to
teach the art of thinking and to instill the intellectual virtues of flexibility
and open-mindedness, creativity, argumentative rigor, reflectiveness, curios-
ity, and so on. If it is the case, as Dewey believed, that ‘there is no such thing
as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of
doing ’, then the understanding that students gain or the enlarging of
horizons that takes place appropriately occurs in the give and take of dis-
cursive inquiry.37 The ‘doing’ to which he referred signifies more than an
absorption of ideas but their active rearrangement, critical examination, and
synthesis with other ideas, an active process of thought that occurs both in
the privacy of inner reflection and, more important for Dewey, in the public
form of co-operative discussion.
The accent that Dewey placed on education as inquiry and on teaching as
the nurturing of the students’ intellectual capacity and habits of mind carries
important implications regarding the issue of instilling beliefs. In the field of
philosophy, as in many others, educators often see their role in the classroom
as that of authoritative judge of what is true. A long-standing tradition has it
that the professor is something of a venerable figure, particularly in his or her
own classroom, a member of the intellectual elite perhaps and in virtue of
whose expertise one’s role includes instilling particular beliefs of one’s own
into the minds of the students. To teach and to learn, after all, is to teach and
learn what is true, and who is the most competent judge of this but the
esteemed personage at the front of the room? If, for instance, an idea
emerges from the general discussion that passes for true while the professor
knows better, or believes otherwise, then it is the professor’s role to instruct
students in their errors and to profess the truth. This conventional and still
widespread view undoubtedly contains some plausibility, however Dewey
would often express the need for caution on the issue of instilling debatable
views in students’ minds on the pretense of authority or special expertise. If
the knowledge that one is teaching in a course on political philosophy, for
instance, concerns the struggle between classes in a market economy rather
than a point of incontrovertible truth, then ‘education becomes simply a
matter of inculcation – in short, of agitation and propaganda’.38 Competent
educators, from elementary schoolteachers to university professors, realize
the influence they exert on the minds of the young, and in the case of
philosophy professors and their students how credulous the latter can be in
the face of opinions confidently asserted by the former. Such credulity, even
168 Education in the Human Sciences
in the intellectual make-up of the advanced student, easily makes for a blurring
of the line between instruction and inculcation or between education and
indoctrination. Insofar as education involves the art of thinking, and insofar as
‘passivity is the opposite of thought’, the students’ passive deference to the pro-
fessor’s philosophical views is mis-educative and easily shades into indoctrina-
tion. An analogous phenomenon in the elementary grades is what Dewey
referred to as ‘satisfying the teacher instead of the problem’. As he wrote,
The operation of the teacher’s own mental habit tends, unless carefully
watched and guided, to make the child a student of the teacher’s peculi-
arities rather than of the subjects that he is supposed to study. His chief
concern is to accommodate himself to what the teacher expects of him,
rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject
matter. ‘Is this right?’ comes to mean ‘Will this answer or this process
satisfy the teacher?’ – instead of meaning ‘Does it satisfy the inherent
conditions of the problem?’39
What calls for thinking, argued Dewey the philosopher and public
intellectual, is the state of the culture as we presently find it no less than the
conceptual and formal issues of academic philosophy. An education in this
field must therefore equip students with the knowledge and capacities of
mind that allow them no longer to be ‘silent partners in the intellectual life
of humanity’. While a philosophical education hardly affords a guarantee of
success in this regard, ‘it does acquaint the student’, as Dewey expressed it,
‘with the forces that create ideas and make them potent, and it should give
some increase of expertness in the use of the tools by which the leading ideas
of humanity are worked out and tested’. Education will always serve a prac-
tical function in helping students to make a living, yet as he continued, ‘to
have some part in the making of ideas is a necessary part in the making of a
living that is worth living, and the chief justification of philosophical study is
that it renders the student more apt at this particular kind of making’.41 This
is an ambitious view of what the formal study of philosophy can achieve, one
premised on an equally ambitious view of philosophy itself and the role that
the philosopher can play in the general culture. If such views are out of step
with Dewey’s time and our own, they remain continuous with the Greek ideal
of bringing the classical love of wisdom to bear on the living of life and the
search for the good.
the role of the philosopher in a culture, and what relevance does this have
to a philosophical education? I shall argue not that Nietzsche surpassed
Dewey on any of these issues but that the former offered insights that the
latter might well have drawn upon while violating neither the letter nor the
spirit of his own position, insights that we would do well to recall.
Let us begin by outlining Nietzsche’s rather broad-ranging critique of the
philosophy and philosophers of his day before turning to the educational
consequences of this critique. Nietzsche would cast his net still wider than
Dewey, applying his assessment not only to his contemporaries but to the
entire tradition stemming from Socrates. The philosophers of the nine-
teenth century and prior, Nietzsche held, had committed errors so
numerous and profound that documenting their full extent is a daunting
and perhaps impossible task. I shall focus therefore on several of the major
critiques from which many of the smaller and more specific criticisms are
derived, beginning with the general enervation of philosophy that he
believed to be something of an epidemic by his time.
The roots of this phenomenon, Nietzsche believed, extend many centuries
prior to the nineteenth, in the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle as
well as in the person of Socrates. What this period represents, for Nietzsche,
is not a transition from mythos to logos but ‘a decline of the instincts’ and the
decisive triumph of the Apollonian over the Dionysian.42 Philosophical
thinking invariably constitutes an instinctive activity of sorts, a form of self-
expression not unlike the artistic. If Greek tragedy represented, in Nietzsche’s
view, the supreme achievement of ancient culture, it was because of its power
to synthesize the rational spirit of the Apollonian with the instinctive drive of
the Dionysian, a synthesis that would not be duplicated by the greatest of the
Greek philosophers or by any who would follow. Philosophy from this point
forward would be dominated by dichotomies of reason or passion, theory or
practice, reality or appearance, necessity or contingency, and so on, all of
which both Nietzsche and Dewey would decisively reject.
The enervation of philosophy of which Nietzsche spoke was a symptom of
this ancient decline of the instincts and along with them the only ground
from which philosophy could emerge. ‘The history of philosophy’ then
became ‘a secret raging against the preconditions of life, against the value
feelings of life, against partisanship in favor of life.’43 With Socrates began
the renunciation of the instincts, of the body and the senses, of appearance
and experience in favor of the rational and other-worldly, creating a trajec-
tory that would orient all later philosophers in one way or another. The loss
of the Dionysian instincts in philosophy led directly to its decline or perhaps
its stillbirth, since for Nietzsche there was no time either prior to Socrates or
later in which philosophy would synthesize the Apollonian and Dionysian in
the manner of the ancient tragedians.
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 171
. . . they are all losers who have been brought back under the hegemony of
science, after having desired more of themselves at some time without
having had the right to this ‘more’ and its responsibilities – and who now
represent, in word and deed, honorably, resentfully, and vengefully, the
unbelief in the masterly task and masterfulness of philosophy.46
Countless such remarks may be found in Nietzsche’s works, and what they
clearly signify is a lament for philosophy itself and the disappearance of an
ideal among those who were calling themselves philosophers. The note of
contempt in such remarks is consistent and unmistakable: ‘For this is the
truth [says Zarathustra]: I have left the house of scholars and slammed the
door behind me.’47 Why this note of contempt, we might ask? Is this merely
symptomatic of an unusually cantankerous personality or is there a properly
philosophical point to this?
To answer this we must understand Nietzsche’s rather elevated conception
172 Education in the Human Sciences
of philosophy and the philosopher and how the thought of his day quite
obviously fell short not only of this ideal but of philosophy’s original self-
understanding as the love of wisdom. I shall discuss Nietzsche’s positive
conception of the philosopher in more detail in due course. For now, it will
suffice to note that its principal themes include value-creation, inventiveness,
critical questioning, depth of understanding, breadth of vision, and respon-
sibility for one’s culture. The academic laborer of the nineteenth century
lacked not one but all of these qualities, Nietzsche fervently believed; their
business requires a narrowing of vision, a focused and limited range of
knowledge, and a self-restraint that is antithetical to free-spirited question-
ing. Fundamentally, they are servants of received thought: analysts and
systematizers, commentators, followers and managers of ideas not their own.
‘It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been
esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and man-
ageable, to abbreviate everything long, even “time,” and to overcome the
entire past.’ He continues: ‘Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and
legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” They first determine the Whither and For
What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of
all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past.’48
The philosophers of Nietzsche’s time were scholastic in Dewey’s sense,
‘mere spectators in everything’, as Zarathustra put it: ‘Like those who stand
in the street and stare at the people passing by, so they too wait and stare at
thoughts that others have thought.’ Such scholars ‘crack knowledge as one
cracks nuts’ – again not a complimentary description, even while Nietzsche
would occasionally qualify this by suggesting that the philosopher’s educa-
tion must include a certain quantity of scholarly labor as a precondition for
thought.49 Yet a precondition is all that it is, and it is this fact of which the
philosophers of Nietzsche’s time had lost sight. For this advocate of perspec-
tivism it was necessary to a philosopher’s development that they master the
skills of the scholar, critic, historian, and what have you, ‘to be able to see with
many different eyes and consciences, from a height and into every
distance’.50 Creative thought undoubtedly requires that we stand on others’
shoulders, but as a means of finding a voice of our own, not in order to
become lifelong scribes and disciples. For Nietzsche, even the greatest of
German thinkers – Kant and Hegel – had been but great critics and schema-
tizers, not philosophers in this sense. Anyone following their lead could at
best remain at their level while a vast majority of their number would of
course fall far below. One implication of this is that ‘the philosopher should
be a rare plant’, above all not one to be confused with the academics of the
nineteenth-century university.51
The failure of the professors to rise above the condition of laborer creates
further problems when the judgments and evaluations of the past are
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 173
adopted as a kind of faith. This is a faith, of course, that does not realize it is
a faith and that indeed regards itself as at the furthest remove from this: it
represents a call to rational order, to certain truth and justice. It is a rejec-
tion of appearances and uncertainty, of unreasoning faith and prejudice of
any kind. Nietzsche’s rejoinder is that the philosophers are one and all
believers in ‘the faith in opposite values’, in an endless series of dichotomies
whose values are hierarchically ordered and unquestioned.52 Reality and
appearance, truth and falsehood, objectivity and subjectivity, good and evil,
and so on remain incontrovertible polarities between which we are com-
pelled to choose, and where there is no choice to be made but for how to
articulate the meaning of the former in each of these pairings. In failing to
question the dichotomies themselves, philosophers fall victim to historical
forgetfulness and transform evaluations and interpretations into an ortho-
doxy. Concepts that are historical contingencies, symbols, and expressions of
a particular form of life or will to power become transcendental deliverances
to be analyzed and systematized but not questioned. Here we arrive at the
heart of Nietzsche’s critique:
threshold and takes pains to deny itself the right to enter – that is philosophy
in its last throes’.54 A thinking that was free-spirited and questioning had no
quarter under these conditions and on the pretense of objective reason
succumbed to what Zarathustra would call the ‘spirit of gravity’. A philoso-
phy that was beholden to science and that idolized received concepts was a
solemn business indeed; it required from the scholar a painstaking sobriety
and a seriousness of purpose not unlike the priests of old to whom Nietzsche
would compare modern philosophers. It required as well an increasingly
minute division of intellectual labor which again had the effect of narrowing
vision and hemming thought within ever smaller specialties.
Nietzsche’s critique of his contemporaries, again like Dewey’s, did not
exclude the personal foibles of philosophers. Ever the psychologist, Niet-
zsche would often remark upon ‘the self-glorification and self-exaltation of
scholars [which] now stand in full bloom, in their finest spring, everywhere’.
If philosophy during the long period of the Middle Ages had been the
handmaid of theology, forcing the thinker to adopt the ways of the schol-
astic, its modern transformation into the handmaid of science changed
nothing essential and left entirely intact the ‘Jesuitism of mediocrity’ that
prevailed among scholars prior to the Enlightenment, including its charac-
teristic preoccupations and ostensible virtues. Respectability and reputation
remain uppermost here, whether we are speaking of the medieval school-
men or modern philosophers, scholars, or scientists:
Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? To begin with, a type
of man that is not noble, with the virtues of a type of man that is not noble,
which is to say, a type that does not dominate and is neither authoritative
nor self-sufficient: he has industriousness, patient acceptance of his place
in rank and file, evenness and moderation in his abilities and needs, an
instinct for his equals and for what they need; for example, that bit of
independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work,
that claim to honor and recognition . . . , that sunshine of a good name,
that constant attestation of his value and utility which is needed to
overcome again and again the internal mistrust which is the sediment in
the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals.55
And finally, what in the world have our young men to do with the history
of philosophy? Is the confusion of opinions supposed to discourage them
from having opinions of their own? Are they supposed to learn how to join
in the rejoicing at how wonderfully far we ourselves have come? Are they
supposed even to learn to hate philosophy or to despise it? One might
almost think so when one knows how students have to torment themselves
for the sake of their philosophical examinations so as to cram into their
poor brain the maddest and most caustic notions of the human spirit
together with the greatest and hardest to grasp. The only critique of a
philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to
see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at
universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by men of
other words. And now imagine a youthful head, not very experienced in
living, in which fifty systems in the form of words and fifty critiques of
them are preserved side-by-side and intermingled – what a desert, what a
return to barbarism, what a mockery of an education in philosophy!64
One who would learn to think philosophically would do well to learn some-
thing of the history of philosophy – a history with which Nietzsche himself
was well acquainted – yet neither as an end in itself nor to acquire Bloom’s
reverence for tradition, but as a training ground for thinking thoughts of
one’s own. Ideas and values are what one lives by, and it is in this spirit that
Nietzsche would have us teach and learn the history of philosophy – as
something to be lived, not entertained as historical antiques or blackboard
exercises.
Not all of our students will become Nietzsche’s geniuses. Perhaps none of
them will, but it remains that an education that is oriented by this aim is
more likely to produce competent thinkers than one that serves more ped-
estrian aims. What is abundantly clear is that the education that Nietzsche
and Dewey both criticized – one dominated by intellectual history, the mem-
orization of lifeless ‘words’, and unimaginative testing – produces only a
stockpiled memory, and only under the best of circumstances. Under more
usual circumstances it produces ennui and a disconnection between the life
of the mind and life. A philosophical education that puts a premium on
independent thought is informed but not overwhelmed by intellectual
180 Education in the Human Sciences
Notes
1. Dewey, ‘Philosophy and Education’ (1930). LW 5: 290–1.
2. Dewey, ‘The Future of Philosophy’ (1947). LW 17: 466–7.
3. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 31. As Dewey remarked in 1934,
‘There is complaint, and rightly, that the population is too amenable, on the whole,
to the influence of propaganda. But why is it? Why are so many people so ready to
swallow what is persistently told them, or told them with an air of authority? Why is
there so much gullibility? I do not believe that it is mainly from lack of native intelli-
gence. It is because they have acquired the habit of listening and of accepting, instead
of that of inquiry, and, if you please, of intelligent scepticism. There are other causes
for this mental passivity. Men and women working mechanically all day, tending
machines, are not likely to be especially alert. But I think the schools have to accept
some responsibility for the prevalence of this habit of mind. While methods of
teaching in arithmetic, history, geography, in fact, all school subjects, aid in estab-
lishing the mental habit of passive acceptance, while docility at the expense of an
inquiring disposition, is too generally cultivated, the evil culminates in the attitudes
that are formed in political, social, and economic matters.’ Dewey, ‘Education for a
Changing Social Order’ (1934). LW 9: 159–60.
4. Dewey, ‘Modern Philosophy’ (1952). LW 16: 411.
5. Dewey, ‘The Scholastic and the Speculator’ (1891). EW 3: 150–1.
6. Dewey, Knowing and the Known (1949). LW 16: 249.
7. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 91. ‘The Liberal College and its
Enemies’ (1924). MW 15: 208.
8. Dewey, ‘Philosophy’s Future in our Scientific Age’ (1949). LW 16: 377.
9. Dewey, ‘Three Contemporary Philosophers’ (1920). MW 12: 239–40. The paragraph
immediately following reads: ‘In one of his articles in which he extols the merit of
pure mathematics, and deals with the distinction between the practical life of man
and his ideal life, Russell avers that the most one can hope for in practical life is some
sort of adjustment between the ideal on the one hand, and what is possible on the
Teaching Philosophy: The Scholastic and the Thinker 181
other. But in the world of pure reason, no such adjustment is needed; there is nothing
to limit development or to stand in the way of continuing increment of creative
activity and noble aspiration. This world of pure reason is far above all human
desiring; it is immeasurably beyond the impoverished phenomena of nature; there
man can construct a systematic universe for himself and dwell therein in perfect
peace. There human freedom can be realized, and the sufferings of practical exis-
tence be known no more.’ Similar remarks are found in MW 2: 64; MW 3: 77; MW 4:
181–2; MW 9: 91; LW 5: 176; LW 8: 39; LW 14: 324 and 334; LW 15: 272; LW 16: 249
and 361–2.
10. Dewey, ‘Challenge to Liberal Thought’ (1944). LW 15: 272.
11. Dewey, ‘The Liberal College and its Enemies’ (1924). MW 15: 208.
12. Dewey, ‘Academic Freedom’ (1902). MW 2: 64.
13. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 28.
14. Dewey, ‘The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education’ (1908). MW 4: 182.
15. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 250.
16. Dewey, ‘Culture and Industry in Education’ (1906). MW 3: 289.
17. Dewey, ‘Why Study Philosophy?’ (1893). EW 4: 63, 64, 65.
18. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 61.
19. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 165.
20. Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). LW 10: 80.
21. Dewey, How We Think (rev. edn, 1933). LW 8: 161–2.
22. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 168.
23. Dewey, Knowing and the Known (1949). LW 16: 248.
24. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 168.
25. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 74 note 1.
26. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 11.
27. Dewey, ‘Philosophy and Civilization’ (1927). LW 3: 7.
28. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 20, 11.
29. Ibid., 29.
30. Dewey, ‘How the Mind Learns’, Educational Lectures Before Brigham Young
Academy (1901). LW 17: 216, 221. ‘The Future of Philosophy’ (1947). LW 17: 467.
31. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 22, 23.
32. Dewey, ‘The Supreme Intellectual Obligation’ (1934). LW 9: 99.
33. Dewey, ‘A College Course: What Should I Expect From It?’ (1890). EW 3: 52.
34. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 37.
35. Dewey, ‘The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education’ (1904). MW 3: 265.
36. Dewey, ‘Some Stages of Logical Thought’ (1900). MW 1: 161–2.
37. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 284.
38. Dewey, ‘Class Struggle and the Democratic Way’ (1936). LW 11: 384.
39. Dewey, How We Think (rev. edn, 1933). LW 8: 327, 160–1.
40. Dewey, ‘Education and Social Change’ (1937). LW 11: 415.
41. Dewey, ‘The Study of Philosophy’ (1911). MW 6: 137.
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale,
ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 439, p. 242.
43. Ibid., sec. 461, p. 253.
44. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989),
sec. 211, p. 135.
45. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 422, p. 226.
46. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 204, p. 123.
47. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 2003),
p. 147.
48. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 211, p. 136.
182 Education in the Human Sciences
Teaching Religion:
Spiritual Training or Indoctrination?
183
184 Education in the Human Sciences
parochialism rather than their opposites, and in general furthers the cause
of illiberal education. All the arguments that one could wish to make against
religious instruction for the young are present and well articulated in
Dewey’s works, yet curiously he himself applied these arguments to religious
education with some hesitation. Religious education was not treated as a
major theme in any of Dewey’s works, yet that it constitutes a major obstacle
to the educational reform he advocated there can be no doubt.
What I outline in this chapter, accordingly, is a Deweyan position on this
issue which is based upon arguments that he provided while applying them
to our present theme in the direct and sustained way that Dewey himself did
not. My question pertains less to what the proper aims of teaching and
learning particular religious doctrines are, be it at the primary, secondary, or
post-secondary level, than to whether the practice ought to be undertaken at
all. My Deweyan argument is that teaching religion in any manner to the
intellectually immature is mis-educative and that what passes for spiritual
training in countless institutions of learning today can be nothing other than
indoctrination and a distortion of education’s true purpose.
To begin, let us recall a few principles that are fundamental to Dewey’s
critique of traditional education and to his own positive views. A basic prin-
ciple of Dewey’s is that when theorizing about the practice of education, as
with other practices, we must avoid imposing aims on the educative process
that are extraneous to the process itself. Practices always already contain
their own immanent ends, and it is the theorist’s task to identify and inter-
pret what these are and to critique the imposition of aims or means that
negate the practice’s given purpose. If the ultimate end of education is the
art of thinking or the cultivation of intellectual capacity which enables
students to negotiate experience intelligently, this requires that educational
authorities practice restraint regarding the instilling of beliefs to which the
authorities themselves subscribe. It requires an adjustment of pedagogical
means to the ends that are immanent to the learning process and a ground-
ing of that process in the students’ own experience. Where traditional
education errs is in its tendency to ground the process in goals that are exter-
nally imposed and that effectively undermine its true purpose. Regarding
the sources and consequences of these extraneous aims, Dewey wrote the
following:
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,
Teaching Religion: Spiritual Training or Indoctrination? 185
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 confi-
dence in the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims through a
double or treble external imposition, and are constantly confused by the
conflict between the aims which are natural to their own experience at the
time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce. Until the demo-
cratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is
recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demand for adapt-
ation to external aims.
The external aims to which Dewey here refers include a particular body of
doctrine, be it religious, political, or what have you, that a community
expects educational institutions to instill in the minds of the young or that
such institutions or individual educators themselves decide to impose. When
such ends supplant the aims that are inherent to the educative process itself
– ends that, according to Dewey, are ‘always rigid’ and ‘can only be insisted
upon’ – education becomes merely a means to an end, and where the end
itself is the content of students’ beliefs rather than their ability to fashion
beliefs independently.3
If conventional views on education regard the practice as in all essential
respects a means to an end – the continuation of a tradition, a preparation
for later life, a precondition of gaining a livelihood, etc. – the Deweyan reply
takes the form not of a categorical denial of education’s instrumental value
but of the assertion of a higher and altogether immanent purpose: ‘the edu-
cational process has no need beyond itself; it is its own end’.4 In theorizing
about the aims of education we face a choice between regarding the learning
process as most fundamentally an end or a means, and where asserting the
former does not deny that as a secondary matter (and the qualification is
important) it is also a means to any number of ends beyond itself. This basic
choice is of special relevance to the question of religious instruction. For its
advocates, religious education ultimately serves the purpose of reproducing
a particular tradition of belief in the minds of the young or, more innocu-
ously stated, seeing to students’ spiritual and moral training, where such
training is taken to be distinct from academic training in the usual sense of
the term. Interestingly, Dewey did not reject outright the view that education
serves as a means of social continuity and of the passing down of tradition.
On the contrary, this fundamentally Hegelian thinker would always remain
mindful of the human being’s situatedness in culture and tradition, and was
never tempted into adopting a Hobbesian or strongly individualistic con-
ception of the self. Persons are constituted by the social relations that sustain
them and the traditions of belief and evaluation that provide them with a
186 Education in the Human Sciences
Further, the entire life of the mind takes its orientation from the traditions
in which we stand: ‘There is no thinking which does not present itself on a
background of tradition’, Dewey wrote, and where tradition consists far less
in ‘blind custom’ than in ideas and interpretations that are passed down to
us. ‘Traditions are ways of interpretation and of observation, of valuation, of
everything explicitly thought of. They are the circumambient atmosphere
which thought must breathe; no one ever had an idea except as he inhaled
some of this atmosphere.’6 Well prior to the hermeneutic or interpretive
turn in philosophy, Dewey asked: ‘Would we have any intellectual operations
without the language which is a social product?’ – a question, of course, to
which he replied in the negative while adding that ‘apart from uncondi-
tioned reflexes, like the knee-jerk, it may be questioned whether there is a
single human activity or experience which is not profoundly affected by the
social and cultural environment’.7
Dewey also maintained that education belongs to a larger social under-
taking to transmit the accumulated knowledge and experience of a culture
to the next generation; however the point that he emphasized concerns the
limits of this undertaking and the conditions under which it appropriately
occurs. In this respect Dewey stood in a long line of philosophers going back
to Plato and Aristotle who warn of the inhibiting effect on rational thought
of deference to tradition or past experience. There is a considerable differ-
ence between acknowledging the embeddedness of thought in tradition and
the kind of traditionalism that is often upheld by advocates of conservative
and religious education. Simple repetition of the past is neither rational nor
educative, while tradition itself constitutes not simply the dead weight of the
past which must be conserved for its own sake but ideas that are often useful
in resolving problematic situations of the present. While much of the cur-
riculum in any educational context, in Dewey’s words, ‘represents the
enduring experience and thought of the centuries’, the ultimate justification
for this is not the conservation or reproduction of tradition as an end in itself
but at best as a means: ‘that it [the school or university] may put more effec-
tually the resources of the past at the disposition of the present’. Whereas the
Teaching Religion: Spiritual Training or Indoctrination? 187
Reproof may be given in such a way that dislike of all authority is incul-
cated. Or a child develops skill in evasion and in covering up things that
he knows are disapproved of. Negativism, fear, undue self-consciousness
often result. Consequently the net effect of even direct moral instruction
cannot be foretold, and its efficacy depends upon its fitting into the mass
of conditions which play unconsciously upon the young.11
In short, the roots of character extend deeper than formal religious and
moral instruction reaches and pertain more to the imagination, desires, and
habits that form conduct than to any doctrines instilled by educators.
Dewey’s reservation regarding character formation and religious educa-
tion more generally extends into his critique of direct efforts by educational
institutions to mold the convictions of the young, particularly convictions
that are of obvious contestability and that are instilled into the minds of
students prior to an age when they are capable of rational criticism. The
Teaching Religion: Spiritual Training or Indoctrination? 189
This important passage rings true for university professors who teach courses
in religious studies, ethics, or philosophy to students who have graduated
from religious elementary and secondary schools, and still more perhaps for
such graduates themselves. Instructors in such fields are regularly compelled
to engage at the outset of a course in unwelcome exercises in intellectual
ground-clearing, attempting to remove long-standing prejudices and to pry
open minds long closed by years of indoctrination. Minds long habituated to
the feeling of certainty and security in convictions for which they are unable
to argue but that have been instilled from an early age and believed in by all
one’s peers and prior educators can be remarkably resistant to entertaining
new ideas, to regarding ideas as hypotheses rather than certainties, and to
questioning their convictions in an intellectually honest fashion. When such
students are not completely unteachable they are nonetheless so habituated
to regarding worldviews as dogmatic systems of belief which can only be
insisted upon or fought over that the concept of education as rational and
co-operative inquiry in the absence of certainty is registered as a kind of
heresy. ‘This professor must be an atheist’, such a student will often think
when the professor speaks of argumentative rigor and the need to subject
one’s convictions to critical scrutiny.
The habits of jumping to conclusions, immunizing certain ideas from
serious questioning, and confusing justification with the provision of emo-
tional comfort are a few of the more common miseducative effects of
teaching religion to the intellectually immature. Such habits may be
192 Education in the Human Sciences
extended well beyond the religious domain to other areas of intellectual life,
such as the ethical and the political, and can prove intractable at later
educational stages and throughout life. Indeed, on Dewey’s view so much of
human thought and action is a result of habits formed and ingrained at an
early age that it is difficult to overstate their significance at all stages of the
learning process. The importance of habit consists not only in its resistance
to change but in its nature as a disposition or inclination that leads the
individual toward certain future experiences and away from others, which
actively seeks out the conditions that call for its expression. It shapes future
experience through anticipation and expectation and by providing powers
by which to negotiate one’s environment and to form purposes. At every
stage of education intellectual habits are being formed and re-formed:
If it is the former habits in each of these pairings that educators would instill,
this is accomplished by creating the conditions that call them forth and fur-
nishing the environment that demands their exercise. The student educated
into membership in a religious tradition is habituated to regarding certain
areas of thought, such as the scientific or the mathematical, as requiring
rational investigation and the rigorous justification of conclusions, while
other areas, notably the religious and the ethical, are beyond reason’s scope,
an attitude of mind that positively inhibits future intellectual development.
One of the principal indicators of educational success, quite apart from
the quantity of knowledge that is amassed, is the students’ adoption of
particular intellectual virtues and the absence of corresponding vices. The
reason for their importance lies in the fact that the intellectual virtues
constitute the conditions that are necessary for future learning and that
make it possible for students to reflect upon their experience long after their
formal education is at an end. Dewey’s list of intellectual vices includes
several that are relevant to the present discussion, none more so than the
dogmatism that he would decry throughout his career. The ‘over-positive
and dogmatic habit of mind’ that is so often associated with religious educa-
tion is fatal to intelligent thought.20 ‘To be bound to a given conclusion is the
exact opposite of being required to inquire so as to find out the means of
reaching a conclusion as a decision that warrants resumption of decisive
Teaching Religion: Spiritual Training or Indoctrination? 193
of truth’.27 Dewey’s distinction here between the production and the trans-
mission of truth is anything but straightforward for either an educator or a
pragmatic experimentalist, both of whom, as he so often argued, must regard
received knowledge of all kinds not as absolutes but as hypotheses found
useful in the past and that may or may not assist us in resolving problematic
situations of the present. If one were teaching biology within a Christian high
school, to take an obvious test case, is it the received truth of Genesis or the
scientific truth of evolution that one should teach? Were one teaching in a
public institution, Dewey’s answer would plainly be the latter, yet what of the
institution whose doctrines directly contradict the consensus of modern biol-
ogists? While this is undoubtedly a question that Dewey entertained, the only
answer he provided – and briefly – is not a principled but a personal one: if
one subscribes to evolution, one would do well to find other employment.
As I have noted, Dewey also expressed considerable skepticism about the
likelihood of direct instruction in religion or ethics producing a profound
impression on students’ character. It is the educational environment, habit
formation, and the course of experience generally that form character, not
straightforward lecturing on religion. ‘It is one thing’, Dewey wrote, ‘to learn
words and sentences by heart and another thing to take them to heart so that
they influence action.’28 A teacher’s example exercises a far more profound
influence on students’ character, including their spiritual character, than
lessons learned on doctrinal matters. As well, Dewey always insisted that
education never be regarded merely as a means to an end, whether the end
is the continuation of a tradition of belief, a preparation for later life, or
anything else. Any activity or subject matter that is genuinely educative
should be treated as an end in itself, even if as a secondary matter it is also a
means to some further end. The same can be said of human experience in
general. Dewey expressed considerable discontent with theological world-
views such as the evangelical Christianity on which he himself was raised, and
in which he fervently believed as a young man, which regard human experi-
ence and life in general essentially as a means to an afterlife, and in the same
spirit in which he opposed viewing education as a means only. As Dewey
expressed it in an essay from 1893,
view comprising a set of doctrines, rituals, and so on. The adjectival expres-
sion, by contrast, refers to
Dewey’s preference for ‘the religious’ over religion reflects both his skepti-
cism of religious doctrines insofar as they purport to describe the truth about
the world and his interest in religious experience. Dewey viewed religious
experience neither as a grounding for any given set of beliefs or practices
nor as incommensurable with other dimensions of human experience. The
religious, for Dewey, is an aspect of ordinary experience, one that need not
commit us to particular beliefs concerning the supernatural. Religious
experience can come into its own only when divested of doctrines regarding
the supernatural. He therefore did not seek to justify any of the confessional
faiths, instead preferring to speak in somewhat ambiguous terms of his
conception of the religious.
It is a conception that does not regard the religious as categorically apart
from experience in its other forms, such as the scientific, aesthetic, and so
on. The ‘“religious” as a quality of experience signifies something that may
belong to all these experiences’ and ‘is the polar opposite of some type of
experience that can exist by itself’. It is a dimension or ‘quality of experi-
ence’ that religions in their traditional forms actively stand in the way of
rather than afford with an authentic outlet. Dewey would speak of religious
experience as ‘a certain attitude and outlook, independent of the super-
natural’, as a ‘deep-seated harmonizing of the self with the Universe (as a
name for the totality of conditions with which the self is connected)’, and ‘a
just sense of nature as the whole of which we are the parts’. None of these
experiential descriptions would amount to theological doctrines, nor did his
somewhat halting use of the word ‘God’ commit him to theism. Dewey would
speak of God as a name for a kind of ‘natural piety’ which he believed to be
absent in traditional religions and atheism alike, both of which presuppose
a view of ‘man in isolation’. As he summarized the point,
Nor is there deliverance from the flux in which human existence is invari-
ably played out, in Caputo’s view. The religious sense of life is part of a larger
openness to mystery and effort to cope with uncertainty that define our
existential condition. ‘Religion’, as he writes elsewhere,
. . . is a way of coming to grips with the flux, a struggle with the power of
darkness, which is ‘authentic’ only so long as it ‘owns up’ to the contin-
gency of its symbols. Faith makes its way in the dark, seeing through a glass
darkly, and it is genuine only to the extent that it acknowledges the abyss
in which we are all situated, the undecidability and ambiguity which
engulfs us all.
‘worth their salt’, an expression that he uses rather often. One who lacks a
religious sense of life also lacks love, he insists, along with passion, depth,
and a few other things. Their experience of life is impoverished and one-
dimensional. Religiosity is ‘a basic structure of human experience’ and
indeed ‘the very thing that most constitutes human experience as experi-
ence’.41 It is a structure that impels us beyond ourselves, beyond what is
known or securely possessed, and toward the impossible. It partakes of the
Dionysian far more than the Apollonian.
Yet religion also partakes of truth, Caputo argues. It is, to be sure, an
unusual notion of truth of which he speaks – a truth without knowledge, or
Knowledge in the upper case. Religious truth ‘is of a different sort than
scientific truth’; it is not epistemologically rigorous or demonstrable. It is
neither a relation of correspondence between a proposition and objective
reality nor is it experimental inquiry. Instead it is analogous to the truth that
we find in art. A novel, for instance, ‘lies’ only in the sense that it reports
fiction rather than facts, in a way that is antithetical to scientific truth. Works
of art say what is true in a different and deeper sense; they disclose meanings
and open up possible avenues of thinking in ways that resonate and transform
our lives. Religious experience as well reveals truth, yet not in the sense that
it provides access to knowledge of a specific kind. He does, however, retain a
notion of special religious truth. It is a truth that is non-propositional,
unscientific, and unknowing; it is not something possessed but made and
enacted in the course of loving whatever it is that we love. Since we love many
things and enact this love in many ways, religious truth is not one but many.
Caputo draws the obvious conclusion: ‘unlike a scientific theory, there is not
a reason on earth (or in heaven) why many different religious narratives
cannot all be true. “The one true religion” in that sense makes no more
sense than “the one true language” or the “one true poetry,” “the one true
story” or “the one true culture”.’ All religions are true – equally so, such that
there is no religious conversion that can be understood as a transformation
from ignorance to knowledge. It is accordingly an undogmatic and, it seems,
relativistic religion that Caputo defends, albeit he does qualify this
somewhat. ‘We may and need to have many religions, and many “sacred
scriptures,” so long as all of them are true’, he writes. However, in discussing
certain religious movements and persons, particularly fundamentalists, he
takes a somewhat different line. Here indeed are movements that enthusias-
tically proclaim their love of God and make a rather strong claim to the
truth. Where do they go wrong, as for Caputo they decidedly do? His answer
is that fundamentalism typically deteriorates into idolatry of a creed, a
‘passion for God gone mad’ which inclines the faithful toward hatred and
violence for those who are not of like mind.42 A group that speaks of itself as
the chosen people or in any way special in the eyes of God is likely to become
204 Education in the Human Sciences
that is often lifeless. That their schooling is dull is the most frequently heard
complaint among students, and nowhere is it duller or more oppressive than
when the subject matter is religion. A lamentable business is religious edu-
cation. Yet might it rise above all this and inspire students with a more pas-
sionate sense of life, one hopefully that remains tied to the post of reason or
that at least can find its way back after the occasional day trip?
If there is one thing needful in education it is the ‘passionate intelligence’
that Dewey spoke of – not intelligence alone or passion alone but the two in
permanent combination. For intelligence without passion, and indeed a
passion for the impossible and the unknowable, is lifeless, and passion without
intelligence is besotted. Successful educators know the importance of infusing
some passion into their teaching and expressing not only their knowledge but
their love of ideas and ideals. Educators may well exemplify a sense of life over
and above teaching in its more usual sense. If one is teaching art or politics,
for instance, it is perfectly appropriate to try to instill a love of art or a sense of
justice that transcends the information the curriculum contains. In the case of
religion, however, there are grounds for skepticism even in the case of Dewey’s
and Caputo’s unconventional conceptions of this. First, religious education is
customarily provided in institutions that are beholden to a specific tradition of
belief. The mission of these institutions is to perpetuate that tradition, in
addition of course to providing an education of a less sectarian kind. Instilling
a passion for the impossible without any doctrinal commitments does not fit
such a mission. Educating students’ religious experience is well and good, they
will say, so long as this means instilling commitment to a creed and remaining
scrupulously on the straight and narrow path. Divesting religion of religion, as
Caputo wants, is easier said than done, and in an educational setting it is likely
impossible. In the case of actually existing religious institutions, as Dewey
noted, they have all ‘retained a certain indispensable minimum of intellectual
content’, and it is futile to wish it otherwise.
All religions . . . involve specific intellectual beliefs, and they attach – some
greater, some less – importance to assent to these doctrines as true, true
in the intellectual sense. They have literatures held especially sacred,
containing historical material with which the validity of the religions is
connected. They have developed a doctrinal apparatus it is incumbent
upon ‘believers’ (with varying degrees of strictness in different religions)
to accept. They also insist that there is some special and isolated channel
of access to the truths they hold.44
This is the sense of religion with which Caputo parts company, and as a
matter of private religious sensibility this may be commendable, but as an
educational matter it is singularly unlikely. Individual educators in sectarian
206 Education in the Human Sciences
(‘faith based’) institutions may be able to get away with this on occasion, if
their employers are unusually broad minded, but it is improbable that this
could be undertaken on a large scale.
Second, we have been speaking of religious experience in its higher
reaches. It is an adult’s experience of God – an unusual God and an unusual
adult – that Dewey and Caputo are describing. Dewey was correct to warn
against trying to impose adult experiences on the young; it is their experi-
ence, not ours, that is the starting point of education. While educators
properly seek to lead the young toward a more mature quality of experience,
they must not have an entirely preconceived notion of where the students
should end up, be it in Dewey’s sense of harmony with the universe, Caputo’s
sense of being unhinged, or what have you. Mature religious experience, if
there is any such thing and if either of these thinkers has succeeded in
describing it, cannot be plastered on from the outside but, if it is to take
shape at all, must arise from within in the manner of any growing thing. How
this is to be accomplished in educational institutions is difficult to see. Instill-
ing a passion for the impossible may be accomplished by educating the imag-
ination, but this is more likely to bear fruit when the subject matter is not
religion but literature and the arts, history, politics, or what have you.
Third, Dewey would emphasize the limits of educators’ ability to shape the
character of their students by conscious design, especially as this concerns
ethics. Character is a result of out-of-school experience far more than in-
school. The same point is relevant in the present context. If we wish our
students to be worth their salt in Caputo’s sense, to love their God or
whatever it is they love with passionate devotion and to enact a religious sen-
sibility in their lives, it is not an educator’s efforts alone that will bring this
about but their larger experience of life over the course of years or decades.
Have educators ever succeeded in producing a mature religious sensibility in
their students through conscious planning? What technique would bring
about this particular ‘learning outcome’? I believe it is inevitable that when
educators maintain this as a goal, indoctrination into a creed or another
form of miseducation is the result. Those who practice religious indoctrin-
ation, of course, never believe that they are indoctrinators; they are providers
of character education, spiritual training, or some other misnomer. They are
saving souls and preserving a sacred tradition. The reality is that they are
conscripting the young into a worldview before they reach an age at which
they might evaluate it rationally, a worldview that will usually remain with
them for life without ever being properly examined. By the time they reach
an age of intellectual maturity their beliefs are set, their habits of mind,
values, and passions highly resistant to intelligent modification.
Finally, regarding both Dewey’s and Caputo’s uses of the words ‘God’,
‘religion’, and the ‘religious’, I would say the following: when we take up a
Teaching Religion: Spiritual Training or Indoctrination? 207
word, we are taking up a tradition of usage, and we are not perfectly free in
how we may do this. ‘God’, to take an obvious example, is a word with a very
long and very troubled history. Redefining or reinterpreting words may be a
philosopher’s prerogative, at least on some occasions, however their histories
are not so easily left behind. Dewey and Caputo both wish to speak of God
no longer in the language of theology or substance ontology, as the biblical
deity or a supreme being of some kind, but as a name for whatever ideals that
we hold, for that which we love with passionate intensity and which rules our
lives. These uses of the word leave tradition almost completely behind, and
while I am not one to insist upon preserving traditional usage simply for
tradition’s sake – language is after all a living thing, and old usages are not
necessarily to be preferred over new ones – these usages appear to border on
the cavalier. Caputo in particular, although he is given to frequent appropri-
ations of Augustine and Aquinas, may be a little too freewheeling here.
Phenomenological redescriptions of religious experience are always
welcome, but reinterpretations of words can be expected to show at least
some historical continuity. As a postmodernist he wants to leave behind the
tradition of onto-theology, as Dewey also wished to do; again this is unobjec-
tionable, but disentangling God from that tradition seems to me an impossi-
ble task.
As improbable a coupling as Dewey and the postmoderns may appear, on
the question of religious experience and religious education the two may be
put on speaking terms. Doing so changes the question of religious education
in interesting ways. It may not, however, change the answer. These two
figures have suggested non-metaphysical and undogmatic conceptions of the
religious; as interpretations of private religiosity they may even succeed,
however importing them into the practice of the classroom, for the reasons
I have suggested, will not.
Notes
1. Dewey, ‘Between Two Worlds’ (1944). LW 17: 463.
2. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 8.
3. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 115–16, 111.
4. Ibid., 54.
5. Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (1908). MW 4: 270.
6. Dewey, ‘Context and Thought’ (1931). LW 6: 12.
7. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 329. Dewey would return to this theme
quite often in his writings and in a wide variety of contexts. In Art as Experience, for
instance, he wrote: ‘Any psychology that isolates the human being from the environ-
ment also shuts him off, save for external contacts, from his fellows. But an individ-
ual’s desires take shape under the influence of the human environment. The
materials of his thought and belief come to him from others with whom he lives. He
would be poorer than a beast of the fields were it not for traditions that become a part
208 Education in the Human Sciences
of his mind and for institutions that penetrate below his outward actions into his
purposes and satisfactions. Expression of experience is public and communicating
because the experiences expressed are what they are because of experiences of the
living and the dead that have shaped them.’ Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). LW 10:
274–5. A similar thought is expressed in an essay from 1931: ‘We cannot explain why
we believe the things which we most firmly hold to because those things are a part of
ourselves. We can no more completely escape them when we try to examine into them
than we can get outside our physical skins so as to view them from without. Call these
regulative traditions apperceptive organs or mental habits or whatever you will, there
is no thinking without them. I do not mean, that a philosopher can take account of
this context in the sense of making it a complete object of reflection. But he might
realize the existence of such a context, and in doing so he would learn humility and
would be debarred from a too limited and dogmatic universalization of his conclu-
sions. He would not freeze the quotidian truths relevant to the problems that emerge
in his own background of culture into eternal truths inherent in the very nature of
things.’ Dewey, ‘Context and Thought’ (1931). LW 6: 13.
8. Dewey, The Educational Situation (1901). MW 1: 301–2.
9. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 348.
10. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 19.
11. Dewey, ‘Character Training for Youth’ (1934). LW 9: 187–8, 186, 188.
12. Charles W. Wood, ‘Report of Interview with Dewey’ (1922). MW 13: 428.
13. Dewey, ‘Context and Thought’ (1931). LW 6: 15. Charles W. Wood, ‘Report of Inter-
view with Dewey’ (1922). MW 13: 428.
14. Dewey, ‘Religious Education as Conditioned by Modern Psychology and Pedagogy’
(1903). MW 3: 212.
15. Dewey, ‘Religion and Our Schools’ (1908). MW 4: 175.
16. Dewey, ‘The Interpretation Side of Child-Study’ (1897). EW 5: 214, 215, 220.
17. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 26.
18. Dewey, ‘Psychology in High-Schools from the Standpoint of the College’ (1886).
EW 1: 85.
19. Dewey, How We Think (rev. edn, 1933). LW 8: 185–6.
20. Ibid., 124.
21. Dewey, ‘Importance, Significance, and Meaning’ (1950). LW 16: 325.
22. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 56, 366.
23. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 39. How We Think (rev. edn, 1933).
LW 8: 347.
24. Dewey, ‘Academic Freedom’ (1902). MW 2: 53.
25. Ibid., 54.
26. Dewey, ‘Religious Education as Conditioned by Modern Psychology and Pedagogy’
(1903). MW 3: 215.
27. Dewey, ‘Academic Freedom’ (1902). MW 2: 55.
28. Dewey, ‘Character Training for Youth’ (1934). LW 9: 189.
29. Dewey, ‘Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal’ (1893). EW 4: 49–50.
30. Dewey, ‘Implications of S. 2499’ (1947). LW 15: 285.
31. Dewey, ‘Religion and our Schools’ (1908). MW 4: 175.
32. See John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); The Weakness of God: A Theology of the
Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The
Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
33. Dewey, A Common Faith (1933). LW 9: 23, 52.
34. Ibid., 19.
35. Ibid., 23, 52.
Teaching Religion: Spiritual Training or Indoctrination? 209
Teaching Ethics:
From Moralism to Experimentalism
Like religious education, some form of ethical training has long been
thought, more or less universally, to be an essential part of the educative
process. Whether it is the direct instilling of values of a particular kind in
students in the primary and secondary grades or the presentation of ethics
as a properly academic subject matter at the university, teaching ethics in one
form or another is traditionally regarded as fundamental and indeed indis-
pensable. As Dewey noted in an essay from 1893, ‘there has never been such
a widespread interest in teaching ethics in the schools as at present’, while in
our own time the interest in ethics in education as in so many other areas of
public and private life is widespread indeed. It is now common practice, for
instance, for university students intent on pursuing a career in the profes-
sions to receive mandatory instruction in biomedical ethics, business ethics,
engineering ethics, or whatever field of professional life one wishes to
pursue. At the primary and secondary levels as well, the idea has long been
that students should be taught to accept certain values or social norms which
educational authorities or the larger community deem important. At the
same time, however, and as Dewey also remarked, there is the ‘pretty wide-
spread conviction that conscious moralizing in the schoolroom has had its
day – if it ever had any’.1 In public schools in particular, we have come to
expect teachers to refrain from instilling at least controversial values and
those that extend beyond the requirements of discipline, civility, and
ordinary decency. If religious schools continue the traditional practice of
providing a ‘moral education’ in the sense of instilling a comprehensive and
theologically based conception of right and wrong, most often we take a dim
view of such ‘conscious moralizing’ in public institutions at the very least and
to regard it as a throwback to the past.
The kind of arguments that Dewey presented against traditional forms of
moral education have carried much influence, of course, yet the questions
that his critique would generate for Dewey himself over a century ago remain
very much with us: what are the aims of teaching ethics at the different stages
of the learning process? Is it to instill a particular configuration of values –
and if so, which values, in what spirit, and by what means – or to teach
students how to think about ethics on their own terms? What, for instance, is
210
Teaching Ethics: From Moralism to Experimentalism 211
the aim of teaching ethics in the university, whether in the form of a course
in ethical theory or in one of the increasingly numerous branches of profes-
sional or applied ethics? Should we teach ethics at all in the primary and
secondary school, or do the arguments presented in Chapter 5 against
teaching controversial religious doctrines to the intellectually immature
apply as well to the teaching of equally debatable moral doctrines?
Let us begin with an overview of Dewey’s critical assessment of traditional
views regarding the kind of moral education that may be undertaken in the
schools. The conventional model is one of direct instruction in ethical
conduct and the precepts that underlie it, precepts that are most often
rooted either in a religious worldview or in the prevailing ethical norms of a
community. The goal of such instruction is to see to it that students hold to
a particular set of values and become habituated to applying them to their
actions – that they become respectful and caring of others, generous and
altruistic, or what have you. Dewey’s critique begins, as would his assessment
of traditional education in general, with the disconnection between
students’ lived experience and the moral lessons that are presented to them
as a ready-made body of doctrine for them to absorb and retain. When moral
instruction takes the form of old-fashioned lecturing on the virtues
combined with practical measures to instill these in the conduct and
character of the young, such education can amount to little more than
‘sheer obedience to the will of an adult’, not least when obedience itself is
seen as a virtue of childhood.2 Students come to conceive of the ethical as
‘certain special acts which are labelled virtues and set off from the mass of
other acts’, or as a set of rules that they must follow for no other reason than
that an authority demands it. Ethics loses contact with the realities of
everyday life and becomes a kind of transcendent deliverance raining down
from on high. On the traditional model, ‘[t]he ethical has been conceived
in too goody-goody a way’, as a matter of naive compliance with a set of
authoritative pronouncements without any connection to the ordinary moti-
vations of the young. Moral education so conceived has little permanent
effect on students’ character, Dewey believed, and remains at a surface level:
‘it does not reach down into the depths of the character-making agency’.3
When it does leave a lasting impression, it is as likely to be mis-educative as
the reverse, as for instance when students acquire an aversion to any
mention of ‘morality’ due to its association in their minds with moralistic
preaching or simple authoritarianism. An equally mis-educative effect is the
common impression of ethics as a body of dogma that is inscrutable to
reason or that is not placed in the service of human life and happiness.
Traditional moral instruction furthermore ‘is pretty sure to be formal and
perfunctory, and to result rather in hardening the mind of the child with a
lot of half-understood precepts than in helpful development’. A strictly
212 Education in the Human Sciences
The only way to prepare for social life is to engage in social life. To form
habits of social usefulness and serviceableness apart from any direct social
need and motive, apart from any existing social situation, is, to the letter,
teaching the child to swim by going through motions outside of the water.9
how much and what kind of freedom should educators permit and by what
means is order or discipline to be attained if not in the traditional, school-
masterish way? The progressive schools that Dewey inspired were often
faulted for their apparent lack of order, with students free to walk about the
classroom rather than silently working at their desks. To visitors the ostensi-
bly Deweyan classroom often appeared to be a chaotic scene of children
engaged in boisterous activity and conversation while the teacher would look
on with shocking approval. Discipline and order, it seemed, had been
sacrificed to libertarianism. Yet how, Dewey asked, is genuine discipline
maintained and in what does it consist? His answer was that ethical or social
discipline must be comprehended together with intellectual discipline, and
that the order that properly prevails is not one imposed by an authority but
‘is the kind of order that exists in a roomful of people, each one of whom is
working at a common task. There will be talking, consulting, moving about
in such a group whether the workers are adults or children.’13 The ‘control-
ling motive in discipline’, then, is ‘the social spirit’ that prevails when
students are engaged in a joint undertaking.14 The work of inquiry itself
requires as an enabling condition the maintenance of a certain level of social
order as well as the freedom to participate, to suggest activities and ideas, to
refine hypotheses, and so on. Such work equally requires intellectual disci-
pline in order that inquiry will arrive at a satisfactory conclusion rather than
deteriorate into pointlessness.
As an educator of many years himself, of course, as well as a parent of
eight children, Dewey was not naive in regard to the maintenance of disci-
pline among the young. As naive or idealistic as it sounds, he would always
insist that both intellectual and social discipline are effectively brought about
not by the traditional means but through free participation in joint under-
takings. As he wrote, ‘No experienced and successful teacher has any doubt
that right instruction is the primary means of maintaining discipline. Students
who are interested in their work and in doing their work well are not
students who are a menace to the well-being of the school.’ If a certain
degree of disorder and carelessness is an inevitable feature of youth, it is
effectively checked less through a ‘system [of] more or less constant espi-
onage’ by the teacher than by means of students voluntarily undertaking
forms of inquiry in which they take a genuine interest.15 The work itself
makes demands upon students in the same way and for the same reasons that
advanced research exacts demands upon investigators in every field which
prevent them from making statements that they cannot justify. These
demands, when they arise in the environment of the classroom, are as much
social and ethical as intellectual or rational.
The principle of freedom arises in the same way, whether it applies to
children in the elementary school or to the academic freedom associated
Teaching Ethics: From Moralism to Experimentalism 217
Let the teacher, at the outset, ask the pupils how they would decide, if a
case of seeming misery were presented to them, whether to relieve it and,
if so, how to relieve. This should be done without any preliminary dwelling
upon the question as a ‘moral’ one; rather, it should be pointed out that
the question is simply a practical one, and that ready-made moral consid-
erations are to be put one side. Above all, however, it should be made
clear that the question is not what to do, but how to decide what to do.19
This last idea refers to his notion of social or moral imagination that is at the
center of Dewey’s conceptions both of ethics and of moral education. The
ultimate aim of such education is the cultivation of an imagination that is at
once sympathetic and ‘intelligent’ in the pragmatic sense of being skilled in
problem-solving. It is ‘the power of observing and comprehending social
relations – and social power’ that an education in ethics seeks to instill, not
a particular set of beliefs or values.20 Terms such as ‘social intelligence’ and
‘moral imagination’ would always remain slightly ambiguous in Dewey’s
writings, but in general terms what these expressions connote is an ethical
counterpart to his pragmatic experimentalism. If it is the art of thinking that
is the ultimate goal of education in general, then moral education as well
aims to develop students’ capacity to think about human relations with an
orientation toward remedying injustice in ways that avoid traditional
moralism. Dewey remarked in an essay of 1894 upon the tendency of uni-
versity students merely to say what appears edifying or what they believe is
expected of them when moral questions arise, an observation that is likely no
less accurate today. The professor must endeavor to get beyond this and to
inquire in an intellectually honest fashion into how students and others
actually engage ethical questions under real-world conditions. He or she
must resist the purely formal and theoretical and make the focus of study
‘the actual behavior, motives, and conduct’ of human beings.21
This orientation away from the theoretical and toward concrete social
relations makes the study of ethics as an academic subject matter more sci-
entific, Dewey maintained, and less doctrinaire. It gets students away from
thinking of ethics as a set of transcendent laws or a system of principles at
some remove from actual human practices and motivations and substitutes a
more case-specific approach that once again stresses ‘how to decide what to
do’. Without renouncing principles altogether, this approach concentrates
on their applications rather than their theoretical grounds divorced from
practice. It construes principles, moreover, not as hard and fast rules or
formal decision procedures, in the manner of the categorical imperative or
Teaching Ethics: From Moralism to Experimentalism 219
So long as ethics is conceived in this general spirit rather than along more
conventional lines, it may well be taken up as an academic subject matter in
the university and high school without the danger of it deteriorating into yet
another orthodoxy to which students are expected to conform. They are
expected, on the contrary, to think for themselves about the social ills of
their time and the possible remedies that suggest themselves to the imagi-
nation, given a careful analysis of specific moral contexts. The habits and
capacities such education fosters include in particular the moral or social
imagination in the sense of the ability to apply experimental reasoning to
social questions in the same matter-of-fact way that one would approach an
issue in the natural sciences. Students are to be presented with specific
instances of moral conflict and encouraged to examine the detailed features
and circumstances of a case. From here they are to construct a hypothesis
regarding its possible resolution, rehearse in imagination what probable con-
sequences the hypothesis will bring about, compare this against alternative
hypotheses, and form a judgment about the proper course of action. As
befits experimental and imaginative thought in general, it does not search
for demonstrative proof for its judgments and remains open to revising these
in light of the overall good that such judgments produce or fail to produce
in their applications. In a decidedly non-Kantian way, the final judgment one
fashions in a case is entirely dependent on its application and whether the
consequences envisioned in imagination eventually materialize and resolve
the original conflict or generate unanticipated and perhaps exacerbating
consequences.
The educator’s task in teaching ethics is therefore no different from
Teaching Ethics: From Moralism to Experimentalism 221
complexity that the student requires a great deal of distance from the social
world of the present in order to gain critical perspective on it, and it is here
that a retrospective glance into history can afford a kind of illumination that
is very difficult to achieve with respect to the present. Historical events are a
kind of moral resource in the sense that the consequences of choices made
and actions taken do not have to be anticipated in imagination but are
already known, motivations and the driving forces behind social relations
may be observed from a distance and so understood, and critical lessons may
be learned that apply as well to the present as to the past. Historical inquiry
not only imparts information of a sociological nature but in an ethical spirit
‘shows the motives which draw men together and push them apart and
depicts what is desirable and what is hurtful’.30 It reveals the consequences of
human foibles and generally provides a larger perspective on social life both
past and present. It enhances students’ capacities of social analysis and
ethical judgment in a manner directly comparable with the study of litera-
ture, which has also been long regarded as an important resource in moral
education.
It is once again in the spirit of experimental inquiry that Dewey conceived
of an education in ethics rather than as any kind of dogmatic imposition of
belief by an authority. How well this general view stands up over a century
after Dewey began writing on the topic is the question to which I now turn.
in Dewey’s sense or otherwise fitting to the case at hand rather than in their
professions of faith in this or that system of values.
If Dewey was correct that ‘conscious moralizing in the classroom has had
its day’, the art of judgment most certainly has not. Indeed, among Arendt’s
major concerns in her analysis of twentieth-century Western culture were
precisely the importance of this art as well as what she viewed as its decline
in the modern world. In a way, Arendt shared Heidegger’s view of the
modern age as characterized by a certain thoughtlessness, although she
would formulate the idea in different terms. Ours is an age, she maintained,
in which ethical-political judgment has become something of a lost art. It has
been rendered increasingly difficult by the decline of agreed-upon standards
by which value judgments may be grounded or with reference to which the
faculty of judgment might gain an orientation. As she wrote in her post-
humously published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ‘The chief difficulty
in judgment is that it is “the faculty of thinking the particular”; but to think
means to generalize, hence it is the faculty of mysteriously combining the
particular and the general.’ To think in this sense may well be to solve a
problem, as Dewey would say, but it is also to judge, where this means not
only estimating something’s relative value or importance but bringing a uni-
versal to bear on a particular without recourse to rules of any kind. Judgment
‘. . . is relatively easy if the general is given – as a rule, a principle, a law – so
that the judgment merely subsumes the particular under it. The difficulty
becomes great “if only the particular be given for which the general has to
be found”.’31 The latter condition that Kant described is what we are faced
with, Arendt maintained, in moral-political judgment. What is immediately
before the mind is a particular situation or problem that requires not only a
solution but a universal under which it may be properly subsumed. Evalua-
tive judgment thus operates not only on a model of problem-solving but in a
dialectic of universal and particular, and a dialectic for which no rules can be
found.
Dewey certainly had no interest in oversimplifying the moral domain.
Indeed he faulted moral philosophers such as Kant and Mill – particularly
Kant – for their rigidity and rule fetishism, among other things, and sought
to formulate a method of solving moral problems that was far more nuanced
than the categorical imperative and the utilitarian calculus. In this he can
well be said to have succeeded, yet Arendt’s point is that often methods of all
kinds must be left behind and that even the most nuanced of rules will not
help us. Good judgment requires that we ‘see the whole’ of a given case or
problematic situation, in this sense playing the role of a spectator rather than
an actor to whom a particular part is assigned. From this distanced, albeit not
completely objective, perspective it becomes possible to adopt an ‘enlarged
mentality’ that transcends the partiality of persons directly involved in a
224 Education in the Human Sciences
led him to commit his crimes. Arendt was at pains in this text to show that
Eichmann was not alone in his failure to think and to resist what the Nazis
were doing. German society in general failed utterly to resist this regime,
including even many Jewish leaders. What explains this fact but the per-
vasiveness of a mentality that either refuses or is unable to judge?
Arendt’s account of judgment is thus embedded within a larger historical
view of twentieth-century Western culture and what she perceived to be the
increasing incapacity of persons to think and judge for themselves, a phe-
nomenon of which Eichmann serves as a symbol. This man was and remains
a sign of the times, a mind unwilling to resist public opinion or political
fashion no matter what it deems. What made this case so compelling for
Arendt is precisely the fact that Eichmann was not a stereotypical Nazi but a
frighteningly normal individual. His case, together with the public reaction
to her book, indicate just ‘[h]ow troubled men of our time are by this
question of judgment (or, as is often said, by people who dare “sit in
judgment”)’.36 When the very word conjures up associations of self-right-
eousness and moralistic preaching, its importance is lost sight of and an
essential dimension of moral agency is abolished. Nazism and totalitarianism
in general needed not only to be understood but judged – harshly – in order
that we can make sense of our social reality and not repeat its errors. It is not
obvious that this kind of assessment quite fits the Deweyan model.
What is the model in this case? When we think back on the Nazi phe-
nomenon we are compelled with some urgency to ask questions and to learn
lessons of a great many kinds, but as so many have remarked, the enormity
of the task makes this singularly difficult. How can we come to intellectual
and moral terms with this? What judgments can we pronounce that do not
deteriorate into the trivial or that underestimate dramatically the sheer scale
of this event? In pronouncing them, moreover, what problem are we solving
and what experiment are we performing?
To understand what is involved in the act of judging, Arendt returned to
Kant – not, however, to his ethical or political writings but to what she
believed to be the unwritten political philosophy implicit to his work on aes-
thetics, the Critique of Judgment. Arendt shared Dewey’s skepticism regarding
Kant’s deontological ethics yet maintained that the third Critique contained
a theory of judgment that was without the rigidity of the categorical impera-
tive while being readily transferable from the domain of judgments of taste
to moral-political judgments. The centerpiece of this theory is Kant’s dis-
tinction between reflective and determinant judgments, which can be briefly
summarized as follows. Judgment in general for Kant involves classifying
a particular under a universal, whether the universal be a concept, law,
principle, or rule. A determinant judgment subsumes the particular under a
universal where the latter is given in advance, such as a rule or law that is
Teaching Ethics: From Moralism to Experimentalism 227
advantage and an impartial taking into account of all persons who are
affected in a given case. This mentality is a sine qua non of good judgment,
Arendt maintained, since the inability or refusal to regard a situation from
any other perspective than self-interest is persuasive to no one while also con-
stituting a rejection of common sense. Judgments have a public quality that
draws us into discussion without formal methods of adjudication. As she
expressed it,
often conflicting. Their application to a case does not resemble the simple
following of a rule but calls upon the interpretive ability, imagination, and
context sensitivity of a competent judge. It requires tailoring a value or prin-
ciple to a case, viewing a particular in the light of a universal. It requires, in
other words, the art of judgment, if by this we understand the capacity to
decide how to set up a given line of experimental inquiry, which values come
to bear and which are secondary or irrelevant, which aspect of a case is
morally salient, which argument is the most persuasive from our own and
from all other relevant perspectives, and when a problematic situation has
been adequately resolved. None of these questions is avoidable or may be
answered in wholly abstract terms. The answer to each is that it depends on
the particularities of the case, and this is exactly where judgment is required.
An education in ethics involves precisely an habituation to answering
questions of this kind. Good judgment is the highest indication of educa-
tional success in this field and it is exceedingly difficult – likely impossible –
to impart directly. More important than a knowledge of ethical theory or
commitment to a given set of values is whether students are able to exercise
intelligent judgment of the kind that Eichmann and his cohorts so hope-
lessly lacked. It is a capacity that is gained through practice above all, in
discussing, reading, and writing about social ills of any and all kinds. Simply
becoming habituated to asking moral questions and attempting to justify our
views in dialogue with others goes a long way toward developing this capacity
and undoubtedly further than presenting students with a simple technique,
with the educator’s own views, or at the other end of the spectrum encour-
aging students to express their judgments without any thought of justifying
them with reasons. To speak of persuasive judgment does not mean that we
are in the land of decisionism, delivered from the need to argue in ways that
are capable of changing minds through an appeal to intelligence. The well-
educated mind may or may not measure up to Aristotle’s phronimos, but it is
able to formulate and defend its judgments with an experimental frame of
mind.
Notes
1. Dewey, ‘Teaching Ethics in the High School’ (1893). EW 4: 54.
2. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 34.
3. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 75.
4. Dewey, ‘Teaching Ethics in the High School’ (1893). EW 4: 54.
5. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 369.
6. Dewey, ‘The Chaos in Moral Training’ (1894). EW 4: 107, 113.
7. Dewey, ‘How the Mind Learns’, Education Lectures Before Brigham Young Academy
(1901). LW 17: 216.
8. Dewey, The School and Society (1900). MW 1: 11.
9. Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (1909). MW 4: 272.
232 Education in the Human Sciences
Teaching Politics:
Training for Democratic Citizenship
Dewey did not invent the idea – indeed it is an idea as old as the Western
tradition itself – that the citizens of a democratic or any well-functioning
political order must be educated for citizenship. A competent citizenry is
one that has received a certain kind of political training, that has acquired
particular habits of thought and action, as well as one that possesses an
important measure of knowledge. If Plato’s classic discussion of the kind of
education that the guardians and the philosopher-king would receive in his
ideal state is the best known example of this in the ancient world, it is also an
idea that threads its way throughout much of the modern history of political
theory and the philosophy of education. It is no coincidence that until
relatively recent times the great political thinkers of the modern age have
been advocates of educational reform as well. How one conceives of a just
society inevitably raises questions regarding the character of the citizens it
comprises and how that character may be educated to assume its role in
public life. One might even critique political philosophies from the point of
view of the conception of education that they make both possible and
necessary, from Plato’s austere and highly regimented view of the guardians’
education to modern liberal conceptions, including Dewey’s, of education as
a training for democratic citizenship.
Among the aims inherent to the learning process, Dewey maintained, are
both the kind of moral education already discussed and a related form of
political training. Democracy and education, as well as forming the title of
one of his principal works in this field, are themes that Dewey always insisted
on theorizing together. While other political doctrines can of course be
taught and learned in an educational environment, what distinguishes
democracy from other such doctrines is that it need not be instilled in
students’ minds in the fashion of an external imposition but is rather
immanent to the practice of education itself. A training in democratic citiz-
enship in no way resembles the kind of political training or indoctrination
that Dewey observed first hand in communist nations, where from an early
age students would be inculcated with state-sanctioned ideology. The kind of
democratic education that Dewey advocated involves no direct instilling
of political commitments in the minds of the young but very nearly the
233
234 Education in the Human Sciences
the people govern themselves. As an ethos, it calls for the widest possible
participation in public life rather than deference to political elites. It calls
upon citizens to rule and be ruled in turn, as the Greek ideal had it, and to
put forth creative ideas aimed at resolving the social ills of the times. For
educators this entails a form of restraint directly comparable to that
described in previous chapters regarding controversial philosophical, reli-
gious, and moral doctrines.
Dewey remarked in an essay from 1924 on the topic of the liberal arts
college in what sense an education at the post-secondary level may be said to
be genuinely liberal or democratic, and faulted many ostensibly liberal
educators for presuming to know in advance of inquiry exactly what com-
mitments and values characterize the properly educated mind:
It is held to be certain in advance just what beliefs a truly liberal mind will
hold. It is therefore established that the way to create the liberal mind is
to instill these beliefs. Quarrel concerns just what set of studies, what
‘curriculum’, methods and beliefs are characteristic of the liberal mind,
and are to be employed and inculcated. Now such direct effort to gain
specific ends is itself proof of the operation of the illiberal mind.
‘the gratuitous stupidity of measures that defeat their own ends’. When the
end in question is ‘social solidarity’ or a democratic way of life, this is not
achieved but undermined by fostering habits of ‘intellectual inertness’ and
deference to authority. ‘Absence of thought,’ Dewey wrote, ‘apathy of intel-
ligence, is the chief enemy to freedom of mind’, while freedom of mind is
the very lifeblood of a democracy.3 As with ideas of a non-political nature,
Dewey was not urging educators to refrain from any and all expression of
personal convictions. It is again the manner or spirit in which such convic-
tions are expressed in an educational setting that is all important – whether
they are expressed with the overt or covert expectation that students will
come into agreement with the educator’s opinions or whether they are put
forward as hypotheses to be debated on their merits.
If the aims of a political education do not include a direct instilling of
debatable beliefs deemed valid by an educator, neither are they limited to
the narrowly empirical or informational. A great deal of the curriculum in
political science consists of empirical information regarding political
behavior, the workings of institutions, political economy, and what have you.
This is all for the good, of course; not for a moment did Dewey entertain the
possibility of striking such informational knowledge from the curriculum in
courses in political science or political philosophy. His point is that an edu-
cation in politics or in anything must go beyond the acquisition of purely
informational knowledge to include, as in all education that is worthy of the
name, the capacity for intelligent reflection. Informational learning in any
discipline, in Dewey’s view, is at once indispensable and non-ultimate; it is a
means to an end. Regarding information in education generally, Dewey
wrote:
I do not mean, of course, that students are not expected to get a certain
amount of information. They must cover a certain amount of ground and
learn a certain number of facts in order to get hold of the data on which
to work. But after all that aside – the side of pure knowledge – ought, in
my opinion, to be secondary to developing the child’s [and the adult
student’s] sense of ends and aims which are valuable, and to developing
his judgment and strength in adapting and adjusting means in order to
reach those ends.
Were it the case that political wisdom, good judgment, or social imagin-
ation followed automatically upon the accumulation of political facts, then it
would stand to reason that the student of politics ought to busy him- or
herself in the still conventional way with amassing as much of such informa-
tion as possible, yet it is plainly evident that the mere possession of facts falls
well short of the ability to think or to learn the higher order of cognition
that for Dewey is the mark of an educated mind. Indeed, the possession of
information may even be counterproductive in this regard; the capacity of
intelligent reflection, on political or any other subject matter, ‘is smothered’,
Dewey maintained, ‘by accumulation of miscellaneous ill-digested inform-
ation’.5 Consider, for instance, the undergraduate student majoring in polit-
ical science whose university education consists mainly or even exclusively in
accumulating enormous quantities of facts regarding political forces and
behavior, institutional functionings, economic dynamics, and so on, supple-
mented by additional information regarding the views of particular political
theorists. Such a student may excel in his or her studies without ever learning
how to critique political ideas or, still less perhaps, to fashion his or her own.
The ability to think is ‘smothered’ by too much information in the sense that
it is never formed by the student into any kind of meaningful configuration
or larger picture of political life, the very quality that makes possible a
deeper, contextual understanding of politics. One does not understand a
mountain of data without arranging it into some semblance of order or an
intelligent frame that allows students to comprehend their meaning and the
uses to which they may be put. The educational significance of information
is that it is a means to an end, where the end is roughly describable as social
intelligence or the possession of good judgment regarding political life. Too
often, however, as in so many fields of study, the students’ reflective capacity
is underemphasized or even confused by educators themselves with the pos-
session of an array of facts and figures or with what is loosely called being
‘informed’. It is not impossible, nor even unusual, to be very well informed
indeed regarding politics and nonetheless incapable of rationally justifying
one’s political stance or fashioning and assessing hypotheses for remedying
the social ills of our time. The isolation of statistics and factual observations
from a larger context of reflective inquiry mistakes a means for an end and
so renders that end ever more elusive.
The depreciation of the theoretical and reflective in favor of strictly
empirical or informational approaches to the study of politics is as inade-
quate on Dewey’s view as approaches at the opposite end of the spectrum
which apply a highly formalized analysis to political life at the expense of any
pragmatic sensibility at all. So accustomed have we become to the separation
of theory and practice, formal analysis and empirical observation, that
educators in the field (or fields) of politics readily fall into one or the other
238 Education in the Human Sciences
This, as we have seen, is a charge that Dewey throughout his long career
leveled against theorists in a great many disciplines, and none more so than
philosophy. Political philosophers, political scientists, and others inevitably
import into their educational practices basic assumptions regarding the
theory–practice relation, the nature of political knowledge, methods of
analysis, and so on which orient the learning process and often direct it
down avenues that show no signs of returning to the realm of political
practice.
Among the errors of formalist approaches is the conception of political
reason itself as ‘something laid from above upon experience’ rather than as
arising from experience and tested by returning to it and providing a better
arrangement of the particulars that comprise social reality.7 Formal analysis
rejects experimental reasoning in favor of a top-down application of techni-
cal categories ranging from the Hobbesian to the Marxian, as if theoretical
vocabularies of self-interest or class struggle allow for a simple filing of social
phenomena into pigeonholes conceived in advance of inquiry into a given
issue or that substitute for inquiry itself. Classifying social realities into con-
ceptual structures originally formulated in an empirical spirit but that in
time deteriorate into inflexible dogmas falls into the same error as all forms
of rationalism: to separate reason from experience, theory from practice,
and to denigrate the latter in favor of a conception of reason that is self-
sufficient and requires no corroboration from experience. For Dewey, all
inquiry that consists in a ‘search for forms simply as forms’, be it political or
otherwise, is empty and at best results only in the ‘acquisition of merely tech-
nical skill’ instead of the kind of knowledge that an education in politics
might bring about.8
What sort of knowledge, accordingly, might a political education provide?
If the aims of education always include a certain kind of knowledge, what
knowledge is it that a political education imparts, and where the answer must
take up a kind of intermediate position or perhaps constitute a higher syn-
thesis between the narrowly empirical and the rationalistic? Not surprisingly,
Dewey insisted that knowledge here as well must have its roots in our lived
experience of social life and that the subject matter of political inquiry must
draw upon the out-of-school experience of the students themselves. Instead
of the political analysis that searches for cut-and-dried definitions of terms
and that ‘substitute[s] a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social
spirit’, Dewey called for an experimental conception of political reason
which rejects the binary oppositions of theory and practice, reason and expe-
rience, and so on.9 Experience, in the pragmatic or experimentalist sense of
the term, and the existing interests of students, form the ground on which
the learning process proceeds, in political and all other areas of education.
An experiential and experimental knowledge in the field of politics is in all
240 Education in the Human Sciences
For Dewey, all political judgments have the status of revisable hypotheses
and never attain the kind of formal certainty that modern political theorists
have often thought possible and necessary if we are to transcend the fray of
everyday political conversation and rhetoric. The experimentalist is never
above the fray in this sense, is never an expert to whom ordinary political
agents properly defer, but is at best an intelligent voice in the conversation
that a liberal democracy represents. Accordingly, if good political judgment
is one of the intellectual skills that an education in this field seeks to bring
about, it will be a judgment that cultivates a sense of its own fallibility rather
than insisting on the truth of its convictions. Good judgment, in politics as
in ethics, Dewey defined as the ability to determine the relative value of
things, to estimate degrees of worth and importance without being inflexible
or a slave to convention. Should educators wish to instill this capacity in their
students – surely no easy task – they must do far more than impart facts of
one kind or another but allow students the opportunity to work such facts up
into arguments and principles that make up a larger perspective on political
life which includes a developed sense of what is important. The student of
politics, or of anything, as Dewey expressed it, ‘cannot get power of
judgment excepting as he is continually exercised in forming and testing
judgments. He must have an opportunity to select for himself, and to
attempt to put his selections into execution, that he may submit them to the
final test, that of action.’13 The reason why students of politics so often fail to
develop this capacity is not that they are ‘uninformed’ but that they are often
given too little opportunity to think for themselves and to have their own
political stance subjected to critical scrutiny. When students are not invited
or obliged to test their convictions in class discussion, for instance, or in
written work, their thinking may be very well informed indeed and yet un-
developed in the sense that it cannot defend itself against criticism or rival
hypotheses. Like any intellectual capacity, political judgment is acquired
through use and is set in motion by the requirements of particular situations
or social ills that require political remedy.
A political education also calls forth habits of reflectiveness and imagin-
ation of the kind discussed in previous chapters. Reflective thinking, for
instance, is a search for the philosophical grounds of our convictions and
involves ‘(1) a state of doubt, hesitation, perplexity, mental difficulty, in
which thinking originates, and (2) an act of searching, hunting, inquiring,
to find material that will resolve the doubt, settle and dispose of the per-
plexity.’14 Because this is not accomplished in a vacuum or solely in the
privacy of one’s thought it requires the practice that a social environment
affords, a shared inquiry into the basis of our convictions and a questioning
of received values. A training for citizenship requires an active and critical
mind, an education that ‘develops the power of observation, analysis, and
242 Education in the Human Sciences
and classes previously hemmed off from one another’, and since as well the
very idea of democracy includes the notion that persons of all descriptions
and backgrounds must converse together on issues of public concern, it is
important that a democratic education bring together students from every
background and social class.20 The public school is thus conceivable as a
small-scale democratic polity in which the kind of social participation noted
above comes about in addition, as an indirect but important consequence,
to several of the attitudes essential to a moral education. Attitudes of toler-
ation and respect, civility and equality, and so on may be fostered without any
need for direct inculcation or sermonizing by bringing students from differ-
ing backgrounds into common association, broadening their horizons and
experiences of difference, and by this means removing the provinciality and
sectarianism that so often give rise to social tensions. The best hope we have
of overcoming racial, religious, and other forms of bigotry, Dewey asserted,
and so of creating a more civil democracy, is for public schools to admit a
diverse student population so that existing social divisions will give way, in
part at least, to mutual understanding and good will. It may be hoped that
bringing young people into a form of association that is rooted in the
achievement of shared tasks will go some way toward eliminating the condi-
tions that give rise to intolerance and enmity.
Dewey applied this principle broadly along lines of class, race, religion,
age, and also gender. Coeducation, for instance, from the primary grades to
the university, is an ideal that Dewey would defend from his very earliest edu-
cational writings and throughout his career and on both ethical and intel-
lectual grounds. Educating males and females together along with students
of different races, classes, and so on cultivates ‘not merely passive toleration
that will put up with people of different racial birth or different colored
skin’, but the ‘understanding and goodwill which are essential to democratic
society’.21 The racial intolerance that had enveloped Germany and Italy at
the time Dewey wrote these words (1938), and which was not unknown on
this side of the Atlantic as well, are the undoing of democracy, as are sharp
divisions of social class and identity. The remedy to this is the public school
that teaches values of respect and equality less through direct instruction
than through the indirect but ultimately more effective means of mutual
association from an early age. The advantages of this are likewise ethical and
intellectual, Dewey maintained. If the moral advantages of overcoming
bigotry and a variety of other social ills are evident, the intellectual purpose
that is served in bringing together students of diverse descriptions consists in
the broadening of horizons and experience and the opportunities for intel-
lectual exchange that it makes possible. The elementary principle of respect
for differences is difficult to impart in the absence of real differences of race,
gender, or class, or purely intellectual differences of belief. In each case it is
Teaching Politics: Training for Democratic Citizenship 245
exposure to what is unfamiliar and the give and take of common association
that leads to an expanding of horizons and an enlarging of experience.
Dewey further argued that the curriculum itself may serve a democratic
purpose, and again without any need for direct inculcation of political
beliefs. American history, for instance, may be taught in ways that draw atten-
tion to the waves of migration that led over time to the settling and present
composition of a nation as well as the contributions that immigrants have
made in various dimensions of American life. It may highlight the struggles
for emancipation and equal rights that African Americans, women, and
other subaltern groups have had to take up, again for purposes not only of
conveying knowledge about the nation’s past but of teaching respect,
equality, and related values of civil association. The combination of curric-
ulum and diversity of the student population, Dewey hoped, might well
succeed in ‘subordinating a local, provincial, sectarian and partisan spirit of
mind to aims and interests which are common to all the men and women of
the country’.22 Such, in short, is the social mission of public education
institutions and the kind of political training that it provides.
The struggle begins with men’s recognition that they have been
destroyed. Propaganda, management, manipulation – all arms of domin-
ation – cannot be the instruments of their rehumanization. The only
effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary
leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the
oppressed. In a humanizing pedagogy the method ceases to be an in-
strument by which the teachers (in this instance, the revolutionary
leadership) can manipulate the students (in this instance, the oppressed)
because it expresses the consciousness of the students themselves.
students’ minds, as the banking concept had it, while ‘[a]uthentic liberation
. . . is a praxis: The action and reflection of men and women upon their
world in order to transform it.’26 It is not only the world that is thus trans-
formed but the students’ consciousness as well. They are raised to a freer
humanity and critical awareness in the same dialogical process that seeks a
resolution of whatever problems they take up.
A political education, then, must be conceived within a vocabulary of
domination and oppression, resistance and emancipation, humanization
and radical critique, and as an overcoming of false consciousness through
the power of dialogue. To an extent this is textbook Marxism of a kind that
is surprising given the efforts in recent years by many on the political left to
overhaul Marxism, or post-Marxism, in ways far more sophisticated than
what Freire has accomplished. Freire’s originality lies far less (indeed not at
all) within political theory than in applying it to education, an extension that
requires educators to be more egalitarian in their communication with
students than his undeconstructed Marxism might lead us to expect. Such
dialogue requires the kind of environment that Dewey had also insisted
upon, one that avoids the old dichotomization of educator and student,
knowledge and ignorance, and that draws teacher and students alike into
shared inquiry. Despite the language of ‘revolutionary leadership’ and ‘the
oppressed’, Freire sought to downplay or replace this old Marxian
dichotomy with an ostensibly egalitarian ethos of loving conversation. Accord-
ingly, he would speak of dialogue as a ‘[r]elation of “empathy” between two
“poles” who are engaged in a joint search’, and as at once ‘[l]oving, humble,
hopeful, trusting, [and above all] critical’. By contrast, ‘anti-dialogue’ asso-
ciated with the banking model ‘involves vertical relationships between
persons. It lacks love, is therefore acritical, and cannot create a critical
attitude. . . . In anti-dialogue the relation of empathy between the “poles” is
broken. Thus, anti-dialogue does not communicate, but rather issues com-
muniques.’27 The distinction between the horizontal and the vertical is
important in separating genuine dialogue from its counterfeit forms which
only reproduce the very relations of power that education should strive to
overcome. The related distinction between communication and the issuing
of communiques is also intended as a limited critique of Soviet-style
Marxism, which Freire would at times criticize for its dogmatism and
‘sloganizing’. ‘The commitment of the revolutionary leaders to the
oppressed’, as he expressed it, ‘is at the same time a commitment to
freedom. And because of that commitment, the leaders cannot attempt to
conquer the oppressed, but must achieve their adherence to liberation.’
Achieving this adherence must not happen by force or manipulation of the
kind that Marxists of the old school have often practiced on the conviction
that the masses are not only victims of false consciousness but ignorant and
Teaching Politics: Training for Democratic Citizenship 249
backward as well. ‘It is not our role’, Freire would argue, ‘to speak to the
people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view
on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours.’
The people’s, and the students’, beliefs about their social world are a
consequence of their position within that world. Bringing them to critical
awareness does not involve forcing them to become Marxian revolutionists
but more gently awakening them to the truth of their plight. It is ‘a critical
perception of the world’ that a political, or any, education properly instills,
not the educator’s values or political stance.28
Freire would often repeat this point, presumably in order to counteract
the long-standing tendency of Marxism to seek to impose itself in doctrinaire
fashion on the ideologically duped masses, where the assumption was that
the latter lacked the intellectual wherewithal to achieve liberation by more
peaceable means. ‘Scientific and humanistic revolutionary leaders’, Freire
asserted, ‘cannot believe in the myth of the ignorance of the people’,
whether such leaders be educators, politicians, or what have you. The people
possess knowledge indeed, he argued, although it is a knowledge that is
‘empirical’ rather than ‘critical’.29 For critical knowledge they must look to
an education that is enlightened and emancipatory without the ‘inflexibility’
and ‘dogmatism of authoritarian socialism’.30 There is no doubt that the
kind of dialogue between educator and students for which Freire called is
animated by an egalitarianism more thoroughgoing than what orthodox
Marxism allowed, yet that important traces of such orthodoxy remain visible
in Freire’s account is equally difficult to doubt.
These traces are apparent in the basic problematic that Freire fashioned,
and it is important to point them out. While speaking of students as ‘no
longer docile listeners’ but ‘searchers’ whose ‘ontological vocation is human-
ization’ and who gradually become ‘critical co-investigators in dialogue with
the teacher’, it remains that dialogue so conceived is rather less egalitarian
and reciprocal than Freire often claimed.31 The educational consequences of
oppression include the students’ false consciousness, where this means not
merely that they are beset by a certain number of false opinions or prejudices
but something far more dramatic. They are systematically deceived by their
oppressors into misperceiving reality, at least at the outset of emancipatory
education. ‘The dominant ideology veils reality; it makes us myopic and
prevents us from seeing reality clearly.’32 It encloses minds in a fog that
causes them to submit to their own oppression. ‘The dominated conscious-
ness is dual, ambiguous, full of fear and mistrust.’33 It must be brought round
to perceiving the truth and ‘develop[ing] a kind of critical reading or critical
understanding of society, even in the face of resistance by students and by
the dominant class’.34 It is of course the educator, not the students, who
possesses this radical knowledge, a knowledge that the latter gradually take
250 Education in the Human Sciences
Domination is when I say you must believe this because I say it. Manipula-
tion is dominating the students. Manipulating culture makes myths about
reality. It denies reality, falsifies reality. Manipulation is when I try to
convince you that a table is a chair, when the curriculum makes reality
opaque, when school and society present the system of monopoly capital-
ism as ‘free enterprise’.
Teaching Politics: Training for Democratic Citizenship 251
The examples are telling; teaching politics without causing students to see
capitalism as ‘the root of domination’ reinforces their oppression and
falsifies reality as one would misperceive a piece of furniture.35 The absurd-
ity of this is as clear as it is that there is far more to manipulation than
outright demanding that others agree with one based on false authority. Let
us suppose that in a class in political theory the philosophy of a John Locke
or a Friedrich A. Hayek, or for that matter a John Dewey, were to meet with
the general approval of students and their educator, or for that matter any
stance that is less far to the left than what Freire prefers. Let us suppose that
this stance has been adopted not because the educator has demanded its
uncritical acceptance but as a result of unforced dialogue. Freire’s analysis of
this must be that this is an a priori impossibility; the non-Marxian consensus
can only be a consequence of subterfuge, manipulation, and oppression.
The critical pedagogue knows which political conclusions a dialogue may
arrive at and which it may not, having beheld reality in its true dimension
and having read a good deal of Marx. This form of dogmatism is more
muted than what orthodox Marxism exhibited but it is equally objectionable.
Morally-politically, the participants in Freire’s dialogical classroom are equal;
epistemologically, they are far from it.
The antithesis – or at least the distinction – between dialogue and domin-
ation is genuine and important, and the ideal of dialogical education is an
attractive one which in some ways can be regarded as an advance over or
perhaps a further refinement of Dewey’s pragmatic inquiry, yet how we
understand dialogue is no less important. When Freire referred to ‘Fidel
Castro and his comrades’ as ‘an eminently dialogical leadership group’, we
can suspect that dialogue has been misconceived.36 When dialogical educa-
tion is politicized in the specific and strident way that he advocated, we are
compelled to re-examine the conditions that make dialogue the kind of
practice that it is or might be, and when domination is reduced to capitalism
and its consequences, we have missed the mark. Domination includes efforts
by educators, be they on the right or the left, to inculcate their political views
in the minds of their students whether overtly or, more likely, covertly.
Dialogue requires the freedom to discuss all views openly and to weigh the
arguments pro and con without anyone putting themselves above the fray of
argumentation or claiming special competence. The latter claim effectively
brings dialogue to an end, and while it is not one that Freire explicitly made,
it is implicit to his account and hoists that account with its own petard.
Declaring one’s interlocutors not only mistaken in their beliefs but victims of
a false consciousness from which one does not oneself suffer is dialogical bad
faith. It declares one’s interlocutors incompetent until such time as they are
critical and radicalized, which means until they come to believe what their
educators believe.
252 Education in the Human Sciences
Freire downplayed this and denied its implications, yet he was unequiv-
ocal on the question of politicizing education. Students ‘must perceive the
reality of oppression’, whether we are speaking of his native Brazil or North
America. Students’ ‘perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by
their submersion in the reality of oppression’.37 Their perception must there-
fore be corrected by those whose faculties are not impaired. Students’ resist-
ance to this must be overcome, and they must not only change their views in
a great many ways but act to transform their society in accordance with the
radical knowledge they acquire. To bring this about, educators must awaken
students to class consciousness, which is a gentle way of saying they must
interpret social reality through a Marxian lens, and until they do they are not
only mistaken but intellectually impaired. They are not, it is true, the
complete ignoramuses and ideological dupes that authoritarian socialism
regarded them as, but almost. Educators must therefore be ‘political mili-
tants’, and precisely ‘because we are teachers’.38 The imperative of militancy
in the classroom is a frequent theme in Freire’s texts. Education, he insisted,
quite simply ‘is politics’, and is not a mere aspect of it.39 Educators are not
only radical (meaning Marxian) social critics but revolutionary leaders who
somehow are not propagandists. How one can square this circle is an utter
mystery, although Freire did manage to deflect attention from it by speaking
the language of empowerment, resistance, and so on.
As mentioned, he also made frequent appeal to the notion of Christian
love, further glossing over the dogmatic implications of his argument.
‘Dialogue cannot exist’, he would write, ‘. . . in the absence of a profound
love for the world and for people. . . . Love is at the same time the found-
ation of dialogue and dialogue itself.’ Such love ‘cannot exist in a relation of
domination’.40 Love can indeed co-mingle with domination or manipula-
tion, in an educational or non-educational context, as ordinary experience
well testifies. When it is thoroughly politicized it is even more likely to do so.
What Freire failed to see is that a certain amount of propagandizing is in-
dispensable to his account, that propagandizing in a Marxian vein readily
shades into indoctrination – necessarily so when one’s interlocutors’ facul-
ties are declared to be impaired – and that doing so with love in one’s heart
does not change that fact. The equality and reciprocity that are indeed indis-
pensable conditions of dialogue are conditions that Freire did and did not
believe in, in about equal measure.
Freire may be commended for placing dialogue at the center of his con-
ception of educative experience. The relevance of this ideal to a political
education is especially important given that training in democratic citizen-
ship crucially involves the ability to justify one’s views in dialogical inter-
actions with others whose ideals or identity are different from one’s own.
Ordinary conversation is the lifeblood of a democracy, as Dewey and Freire
Teaching Politics: Training for Democratic Citizenship 253
Notes
1. Dewey, ‘The Prospects of the Liberal College’ (1924). MW 15: 201–2, 203.
2. Dewey, ‘Unity of Science as a Social Problem’ (1938). LW 13: 279.
3. Dewey, ‘Conscription of Thought’ (1917). MW 10: 279.
4. Dewey, ‘Period of Technic’, Educational Lectures Before Brigham Young Academy
(1902). LW 17: 294.
5. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 57.
6. Dewey, Knowing and the Known (1949). LW 16: 249–50.
256 Education in the Human Sciences
Teaching History:
The Past and the Present
If history be regarded as just the record of the past, it is hard to see any
grounds for claiming that it should play any large role in the curriculum
of elementary education. . . . There are too many urgent demands in the
present, too many calls over the threshold of the future, to permit the
child to become deeply immersed in what is forever gone by.3
The first thing to note here is that he was speaking of elementary school edu-
cation. Students at more advanced levels may regard such knowledge as an
end in itself – in the way that students of mathematics may develop a theo-
retical interest that surpasses its practical origin – but here he was referring
to the beginning of the learning process. How is an interest in history origi-
nally awakened, one that will supply the level of attention necessary for
sustained inquiry? The second point is the conditional tense of the first
257
258 Education in the Human Sciences
But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present. History
deals with the past, but this past is the history of the present. An intelli-
gent study of the discovery, explorations, colonization of America, of the
pioneer movement westward, of immigration, etc., should be a study of
the United States as it is to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it
in process of formation makes much that is too complex to be directly
grasped open to comprehension.8
260 Education in the Human Sciences
draw, provided that we are not skimming surfaces but inquiring more deeply
into the meanings, motivations, and consequences of historical events. When
the mind grasps not only what happened and when but what it signified,
including especially its implications for today, then its perspective is trans-
formed and a light is shed that is difficult to effect by more direct means.
Ultimately what the student of history wants to know is not what happened
in the past but what is happening today. Many have said that the present era
in history is a time of transition of some ambiguous kind. Determining what
kind is again very difficult to do, given the bewildering complexity of our
times. What is needed is a distanced perspective on the present, the stand-
point of a past age that resembles our own in some important respects. As
Dewey remarked in 1947,
about’.14 Should we wish to critique a given social ill, we must know some-
thing of its history – what its causes were or its conditions of possibility –
before we are in a position to debate solutions. Resolving such problems in
an historical vacuum or on the basis of what we perceive today alone is likely
to fail.
An illustration of this can be found in Dewey’s own historical reflections.
‘The simple fact’, as he remarked in 1902, ‘is that we are living in an age of
applied science. It is impossible to escape the influence, direct and indirect,
of the applications.’15 As we have seen, Dewey regarded this primarily as a
positive development although he was never inclined toward the kind of
scientism to which the positivists of his time subscribed. Science, suitably
understood, was a model for intelligent thinking in general, yet he also main-
tained that the idolatry of science and technology was a grievous error into
which a great deal of twentieth-century culture had fallen. Contemporary
conceptions of education, for instance, that are utterly wedded to technol-
ogy and to notions of efficiency and performativity, find no support in
Dewey’s writings. The ‘movement for introducing scales, standards, and
methods of measurement into teaching and administration’ and the
‘seeping into education of “efficiency” concepts and methods which modern
life is making inevitable’, as he noted in 1917, is inevitable only in part.16 Had
he lived to see the trend continue as it has, to the point that education is
regarded no longer as an art but as a kind of applied science, his reply would
be to remind us of the limits of scientific knowledge. Advancing this critique
would require some historical reflection on how this trend came into being
and the forces that propelled it into its current form. Corporate scientism in
education is for many an inevitable consequence of modernity along with
the ethos of technology, instrumental rationality, and performativity. It is a
symptom of an underlying historical phenomenon, and to gain a critical
understanding of it requires precisely this kind of reflection. When technol-
ogy becomes an all-pervasive way of thinking, one to which all social practices
must give an accounting, it has become a dogma that must be placed in
historical perspective.
A critical understanding of the present also involves learning the innu-
merable lessons that history teaches. Nothing educates our experience as
well as past experience, whether we are speaking of our personal past or of
past generations and epochs. As every student of history knows, human
experience repeats itself constantly. Beneath the superficial differences,
particularities, and appearances, human existence of the past and present
revolves around recurring themes of love and hate, joy and suffering,
ingenuity and avarice; it involves the playing out of themes in infinite varia-
tion. One with an interest in the history of war, for instance, will find behind
outward differences of strategy and technology recurrent patterns of moti-
Teaching History: The Past and the Present 263
vation, greed, and power seeking. One finds similar motivations meeting
similar consequences and the same mistakes regularly repeated. The history
of religion finds similar patterns of love for the impossible co-existing with
legitimation, hatred, and again power seeking. The history of government
finds the same passion for justice inseparably linked with intrigue, overstep-
ping, and of course power seeking. Whether we are speaking of the ancient
world or the moderns, foreign cultures or our own, history recurs. For this
reason it also teaches as the discoveries and errors of the past make up a
wealth of historical experience that never loses its relevance.
The lessons of history may be positive or negative, consisting of the
achievements of human intelligence or the blunders, but it is these lessons
and our capacity to learn from them on which progress relies. History is
always contemporary. The experience with which it provides us is vicarious,
oblique, and obscured by time, but its value transcends anything that the
individual, bound by the present, may learn on his or her own. A large
majority of our experience and knowledge is of this nature; it is undergone
or derived by our predecessors, vicarious, and indirect. The lessons learned
thereby may resonate in our souls somewhat less than those derived from
personal experience, but resonance does not always equate with importance.
What we learn, for instance, in studying the history of race relations far
exceeds anything we could or would wish to experience today. Unless every
generation must have its own experience of genocide, slavery, or segrega-
tion, it might be hoped that we could learn from the errors of our pre-
decessors. This is the kind of ‘concrete sociology’ that Dewey was speaking
of: ‘We are unfortunately familiar with the tragic racial intolerance of
Germany and now of Italy’, as he wrote in 1938. The question to be asked is,
Are we entirely free from that racial intolerance, so that we can pride
ourselves upon having achieved a complete democracy? Our treatment of
the Negroes, anti-Semitism, the growing (at least I fear it is growing)
serious opposition to the alien immigrant within our gates, is, I think, a
sufficient answer to the question.17
This was not an historical matter in 1938, of course. It is today, yet the ques-
tions we are left with are the same. If students now know a good deal about
the Holocaust, from who the perpetrators were to the identity and numbers
of victims, the events and circumstances of the war, the question remains,
what are they really learning? Are they gaining information that might be
useful some day, so that when the topic arises in conversation or on television
they will know how to follow along? Are they becoming culturally literate in
Hirsch’s sense, armed with an impressive array of facts and figures that can
be displayed on a multiple-choice test? If this is the extent of their learning
264 Education in the Human Sciences
then they are neither culturally literate in a truer sense of the term (since
being literate implies that one understands what one reads) nor educated.
The point of what is now called Holocaust studies is to learn from the past,
where this means to integrate its lessons with our present experience. The
arduous work of inquiry into what happened in the past and how this can be
verified serves a larger purpose than mere recollection. This example makes
the point especially clear, but in principle the same applies to historical
experience in general. Nothing teaches so well as errors of the sort of which
history is replete. The record of the past of course includes not only errors
but advances and discoveries which also make up our historical experience.
History is essentially the record of human experience, its trials and errors, its
achievements and failed experiments, a great deal of which is plainly
relevant to our own efforts to resolve issues not unlike those encountered by
our forebears. Historical lessons are typically more straightforward than what
we witness at present, given the advantage of retrospection and its capacity
to observe the long-term consequences of particular actions and to see the
larger course of experience with greater clarity than the perspective of the
present allows. Learning the lessons of history, Dewey held, also involves
attending to the sort of characters and motivations that underlie events and
the ends to which they lead. If, as he put it,
Among the marks of educational success is not only that one has learned a
certain amount in a given discipline but that one is able to learn. One is able
to learn more specifically from experience or life, and it matters little
whether that experience is first-hand or vicarious. The capacity and inclin-
ation to learn throughout life are contingent on the intellectual virtues and
habits that education instills. These include much the same virtues as
previous chapters have mentioned: open-mindedness or the hospitality to
new ideas, curiosity, reasonableness, tenacity, a sense of intellectual fallibility
and finitude, and breadth of perspective. This last quality is especially
relevant to the study of history since it is in this field that the mind is per-
mitted to venture far beyond the narrow purview of today and to see what
human life has been like in other times and places. Dewey’s description of
the ‘mentally active scholar’ applies here quite readily: the
Teaching History: The Past and the Present 265
mind roams far and wide. . . . Yet the mind does not merely roam abroad.
It returns with what is found, and there is constant exercise of judgment
to detect relations, relevancies, bearings upon the central theme. The
outcome is a continuously growing intellectual integration. There is
absorption; but it is eager and willing, not reluctant and forced. There is
digestion, assimilation, not merely the carrying of a load by memory, a
load to be cast off as soon as the day comes when it is safe to throw it off.19
The integration and digestion of knowledge this passage refers to allows for
a broadening of the student’s perspective. Breadth in this sense means not
only the acquisition of facts about various cultures and ages but a horizon
that is wide enough to integrate these facts into a coherent arrangement, to
perceive meaning in them, and to draw thematic connections between
events from different eras. To be able to compare political or military events,
for example, between ages in more than superficial ways is a skill of which
the student of history ought to be capable. To be able to stand back from the
endless particulars with which history deals and to see their contribution to
larger themes, the significance of which only grows with the passage of time,
is a primary virtue of this kind of education.
No less important than having a broad perspective on history is depth of
understanding. Here again is a value that virtually defies objective measure-
ment while its importance is of the first order. What does it mean to possess
a deep understanding of history, or of the history of this or that era? It is to
have a kind of knowledge that surpasses the informational, but in what way?
Dewey answered not the specific question but the general one of what dis-
tinguishes depth from superficiality:
certain amount about the relevant facts but makes fine distinctions and
responds to particular works on the appropriate ‘plane’. One has a sense of
what is important and what is trivial, and of what makes it so.
A sense of history, in Dewey’s view, includes an understanding of what is
typical or characteristic of an age and in what respects it differs from others.
Given the difficulty of comprehending ‘the essential constituents of the
existing order’ of our own time and place, an understanding of prior eras is
less elusive and can shed light on the distinguishing features of the present.
‘Greece, for example, represents what art and growing power of individual
expression stand for; Rome exhibits the elements and forces of political life
on a tremendous scale.’21 To elaborate the point, one may speak intelligibly
of ‘the Greek mind’ or ‘the political ethos of Rome’, just as one can speak of
the spirit of the Renaissance or of the Enlightenment. These are abstrac-
tions, but they contribute something important to our historical under-
standing. Once fleshed out, they offer a sense of what distinguished that age
from others and of what made it the historical phenomenon that it was. As
Dewey remarked in an essay from 1897,
One reason historical teaching is usually not more effective is the fact that
the student is set to acquire information in such a way that no epochs or
factors stand out to his mind as typical; everything is reduced to the same
dead level. The only way of securing the necessary perspective is by
relating the past to the present, as if the past were a projected present in
which all the elements are enlarged.22
Typically one does not have an explicit sense of what typifies the present
and must look for clues to comparisons with other times. Historical self-
understanding is an elusive value but one that an education in this field
properly serves.
For Dewey, breadth and depth of understanding are ultimately con-
nected, as are the faculties of imagination, historical memory, and reflection.
Only on the surface does the study of history serve the memory over and
above reflective thinking, for example, or sociological interpretation. Reflec-
tion and recollection are especially hard to separate since ‘[t]o reflect is to
look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings which
are the capital stock for intelligent dealing with further experiences. It is the
heart of intellectual organization and of the disciplined mind.’23 Faculties of
mind, Dewey would always insist, are not discrete entities but dimensions of
a unified experience. Returning to the example of the Holocaust, we find a
clear illustration of this phenomenological point: one does not recall with
any degree of vividness the atrocities of that time without emotion and the
most profound reflection, without one’s sense of justice being called into
Teaching History: The Past and the Present 267
play, and without questioning how this could have come to pass and whether
human nature will allow some analogous event to happen in future. One
does not simply remember, any more than one remembers one’s personal
past without interpretation and affective response.
Historical memory is no more a power unto itself than investigation into the
past is isolatable from various other branches of inquiry.
Among these branches, as we saw in Chapter 6, is ethics. Moral com-
petence is instilled not by lecturing to the young on values or behavioral
reinforcement but through the indirect route of social inquiry. In Dewey’s
words, ‘When history is taught as a mode of understanding social life it has
positive ethical import.’ Its import consists not in recollection alone but in
‘the formation of habits of social imagination and conception’.25 The
student of history is transported in imagination into the past and into the
circumstances of various actors and is not engaged in an epistemological
enterprise alone. While questions of what happened and how this is known
have a certain authority, history that is taught and learned in a sociological
spirit calls out moral responses which may become habitual. ‘History’, as he
put it, ‘. . . represents doubtless the most effective conscious tool’ in this
regard; it is more effective than direct efforts to instill the virtues since it
reaches more deeply into the capacities of imagination and responsiveness
in which moral competence largely consists.26 Such competence is not
‘plastered on’ from the outside but emerges within experience in the same
way that intellectual competence as Dewey conceived it is a product of habits
formed in the course of sustained inquiry.27 An example of moral learning to
which Dewey referred is the history of toleration. How is such a virtue
acquired if not by means of direct exhortation? By means of inquiry into the
history of intolerance in its various forms and the consequences to which it
has led. In turn this leads the mind to question whether the historical lesson
of toleration has indeed been learned, whether by the individual him- or
herself or by the larger society. It leads us to see, as he put it, that
cohesive action and stirs deep feeling, we at once dignify the unpopular
cause with persecution; we feed its flame with our excited suspicions; we
make it the center of a factitious attention and lend it importance by the
conspicuousness of our efforts at suppression.28
experience ‘is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflec-
tion of past generations and by-gone ages’, including the categories of our
language and ‘the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate
the culture of our own time and place’.30
In his typical way Dewey regarded a consciousness of history not only as
embedded in the past but as a forward-looking awareness as well. It belongs
to reflection to determine the future direction of the culture in which we
stand and to participate actively in its future unfolding. Historical con-
sciousness is not a consciousness of the self as a hapless social product but an
awareness of history as something that is not over and done with, as entail-
ing a mode of intelligent participation in the life of one’s culture and a
search for progress.
Finally, on the matter of formal testing to determine in some way the
extent to which such aims have been accomplished, Dewey expressed no
objection, although the difficulty of assessing historical knowledge beyond
the superficialities is clear. Whether it is possible at all to quantify the kind
of understanding and intellectual habits of which I have been speaking is as
contestable as the idea of quantifying what the student of literature or
philosophy has learned at the conclusion of a given course of study. When
information alone defines our educational goals there is little difficulty in
measuring ‘learning outcomes’, but when we are aiming higher, objective
assessment is a difficult matter indeed. Once again Dewey did not address
this question specifically, however if we would answer it in a Deweyan spirit
we might say that assessment of some kind is indeed possible. What is
sometimes called rich knowledge is assessable even while there are limits to
its precision. Multiple-choice examinations will surely not do, being the
bluntest instrument ever devised by educators, yet formal essays and essay-
style questions in examinations which require relatively long and analytical
answers do test a student’s understanding with at least moderate effective-
ness. When grades are made to depend directly on reflective thought, and
when this has been exhibited to some degree by the educator and the
students during the course of study, students are well capable of engaging in
this with about as much rigor as is expected of them. The common com-
plaint that grading such matters is subjective is as spurious as the dichotomy
between objective and subjective on which the complaint is based. Just as we
know what constitutes sound historical scholarship by professionals, we can
well distinguish a better interpretation of a given historical occurrence from
a worse one when the author is a student. There is nothing mysterious in
this, any more than grading is a mysterious matter in any other branch of the
human sciences where there is something more than factual knowledge to
be had.
270 Education in the Human Sciences
Dewey’s reply to this would surely have been harsh; what, he or any prag-
matist would ask, is the point of recounting the history of a problem if one
is not intent on a solution? On the question that is before us, however – the
nature and aims of historical inquiry – the positions of these two thinkers are
interestingly similar while their differences will turn out to be instructive as
well.
Let us begin with the similarities. Why should we introduce Foucault’s his-
torical reflections into this discussion when he did not provide a direct
answer to the question of the aims of an historical education and when he
also appeared to deny the very possibility of looking to the past for intelligent
solutions or alternatives to the problems of the present? The answer can be
found in Foucault’s descriptions of his own historical investigations, or
genealogies as he, following Nietzsche, preferred to call them. The point of
genealogy, in his words, is to provide an ‘historical awareness of our present
circumstances’, a ‘history of the present’ that serves a critical intent.33 The
latter phrase appeared in Discipline and Punish of 1975, an historical–critical
account of the modern prison. Foucault concluded the book’s first chapter
this way: ‘I would like to write the history of this prison. . . . Why? Simply
because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history
of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of
the present.’34 Foucault of course did not cite Dewey’s use of the same idea
and the same phrase, and presumably was unaware of it. Not only the phrase
is the same. In all of Foucault’s historical or genealogical writings he insisted
that the relevance of the past is solely its connection with the present and the
Teaching History: The Past and the Present 271
history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare
to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the
metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleolo-
gies. It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’.35
The main focus of Foucault’s genealogical writings is the less visible forms
of power and the multiple ways in which these are exercised in modern social
and discursive practices. Having abandoned the search for a suprahistorical
or totalizing standpoint for social criticism, Foucault abandoned as well the
ideal of power-free communication at the heart of the Marxian – including
Freire’s – theory of critique. Foucault regarded the dichotomy of dialogue
and domination and the ideals of power-free discourse and a power-free
society as dangerously utopian and proposed to replace them with specific
historical inquiries into the workings of power within modern society. Unlike
orthodox Marxism again, he did not limit his analysis to the effects of
powerful interests or centralized authority. Power is misunderstood as the
private possession of an agent, whether individual, state, church, or institu-
tion, since this overlooks the multiple ways in which power is exercised
without a specific agent of domination. Without minimizing the importance
of state power, the principal objects of Foucault’s critique are those exercises
of power that are ‘capillary’ and which in a sense make centralized domin-
ation possible. Genealogy traces the effects of strategies that, while deci-
pherable, are often without malicious intent and are just as frequently
authorless. It reveals how power is exercised not on a top-down basis but
from the bottom up, how relations of inequality circulate and pervade a
great variety of practices and institutions, and how they constitute the social
domain as a totality. In short, genealogy documents how power relations
have been able to operate and the specificities of their interconnections.
As incisive as Foucault’s analysis of social and political power is, he was no
less concerned with epistemic power, particularly within the human sciences.
The concept of power/knowledge is central to Foucault’s thought, especially
in the genealogical writings. Against those who maintain that statements, in
order to be constituted as knowledge, must be emancipated from all vestiges
of domination (again, Freire is a fitting example), and who hold out the pos-
sibility of objective and rational adjudication, Foucault refused to separate
interested from neutral, subjective from objective, discourse. There is, he
held, no knowledge outside of power relations, no neutral method of
adjudicating competing truth-claims. Knowledge does not presuppose the
suspension of power relations but requires the latter as a condition of possi-
bility. Nor are power and knowledge antithetical, such that truth may appear
only once the effects of power that conceal the truth are suspended. Rather,
knowledge and power are correlative. In addition to being an instrument of
domination, power has a productive capacity in the constitution of know-
ledge. As Foucault put it, ‘We must cease once and for all to describe the
effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it
“abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces; it produces
reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.’ Without collaps-
Teaching History: The Past and the Present 275
history, to be sure, but also as having a great many preconditions and conse-
quences. What social undercurrents made this possible – a question that
Dewey confronted directly – and how it continues to form attitudes are ques-
tions for the student of history no less than the more straightforward factual
questions.40 The same can be said of past events more generally, insofar as
they hold genuine historical importance. The point warrants emphasis
because of the still prevalent view that historical recollection or the simple
conservation of memories is its own end, as if recollection were an isolated
faculty of mind unrelated to critique, sociological interpretation of the
present, a sense of justice, and so on. It is precisely the memory of historical
atrocities and imbecilities, still more perhaps than the great achievements of
the past, that directly inform our political sensibilities. The sense of justice is
educated by learning the lessons of history, many or most of which are
cautionary tales about the consequences of primal stupidity. The recollec-
tion of the Holocaust and the moral imperative of ‘Never again’ are from an
educational standpoint inseparable. If we are indeed becoming a society that
is losing its collective memory along with its attention span, as many fear,
what would make this regrettable is not the failure of a conservation project
but the lost opportunities for social learning. As with any good narrative,
history contains a moral – more likely a remarkably complex set of over-
lapping and conflicting morals – which it falls to the student of history to
interpret no less than the student of ethics or politics.
It is an historical sense of this kind that is the highest achievement of
education in this field. This is a complex sense that incorporates a good deal
of informational knowledge about the past, together with knowledge of a less
empirical kind. Dewey called this knowledge sociological while for Foucault
it is a more political matter, in a subtler and deeper sense of the word than
that which pertains to the state. It is a knowledge that is less tangible, less spe-
cialized, and less mundane than the informational. In posing questions of
critique it is far removed both from the quasi-value-neutrality of positivistic
history and from the conservative preservation for preservation’s sake view.
It is a kind of knowledge that does not lend itself to the kind of examina-
tion that we find on the SAT and other tests of its kind. Such examinations
are far too blunt an instrument to test the capacities that history educates,
just as they are too blunt to test the real achievements of learning in all other
fields of the human sciences. The SAT – a scam that has far less to do with
education than with money and the self-interest of the universities – contin-
ues to compress all knowledge of American history, for example, into so
many multiple-choice questions that at best skim the surface of historical
understanding. While the authors of this test undoubtedly believe they have
moved beyond the level of sophistication of tests that dwelled on names,
dates, and events, they have succeeded to a very minor extent. Despite
278 Education in the Human Sciences
their assertion that they are testing for contextual and ‘big picture’
understanding, this end is subverted by the choice of means. The multiple-
choice question, no matter how cleverly formulated, fails utterly to test real
understanding; at best it mimics this and at worst it deteriorates into guess-
work. This form of questioning more than any other – with the possible
exceptions of the true–false question and ‘Fill in the blank’ – is the death of
thinking. It is common knowledge that tests of this kind can be passed with
flying colors by students shrewd in the art of test preparation while their level
and quality of historical understanding remains rudimentary. This cannot be
overcome by better questions but is inherent to the multiple-choice format
itself. The format in short is simplistic and shallow. That American students
are still subject to this test, in order to feed the marketing machinery and
sheer arrogance of the universities, is a travesty.
How, then, can such knowledge be tested? I am afraid that the answer to
this question will need to be complex, and too much so to be of help in
university marketing campaigns. Historical knowledge, like the knowledge of
philosophy or literature, is qualitative, interpretive, critical, and some other
things that defy psychometrics. It is a sensibility, or set of sensibilities, that
can be tested by means of essays and essay-style questions on examinations.
Unfortunately these cannot be graded by computer but by educators alone
who bring their historical knowledge and professional judgment to bear and
who are themselves capable of making qualitative judgments. A good histor-
ical interpretation is distinguishable from a poor one if a person has the
appropriate knowledge, even if the marker is not able to point to a bubble
correctly or incorrectly filled in. Standardized and multiple-choice testing
should be seen for what it is: a bad substitute for understanding, an uncriti-
cal mode of cognition, and an insult to human intelligence. Why it persists
is a question more educators might well ask.
Educated students of history possess a great deal of information while
being able to discern the meanings of the past and its connections with the
present. They possess an historical consciousness that is aware of its own
embeddedness in the traditions they study and critical of conditions of the
present whose origins and histories they can recount. In a large sense they
have an understanding of their culture that is based on how it came to be
and a sense of where it may be headed. A knowledge of this kind is elusive
and difficult to quantify, yet it is also among the highest achievements of
education in the human sciences.
Notes
1. This caricature has been given new life by two recent books, Henry Edmondson’s John
Dewey and the Decline of American Education (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006) and Kieran
Egan’s Getting It Wrong From the Beginning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Teaching History: The Past and the Present 279
All the standard misreadings are repeated here, including that on Dewey’s view
history ought to be stricken altogether from the curriculum. No textual support for
this misinterpretation is provided by either author, presumably because Dewey never
wrote this, nor did he imply or believe it.
2. Dewey, ‘History for the Educator’ (1909). MW 4: 192.
3. Ibid., 192.
4. Ibid., 192.
5. Dewey, ‘Bankruptcy of Modern Education’ (1927). LW 3: 278.
6. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 104.
7. Dewey, ‘Education from a Social Perspective’ (1913). MW 7: 125.
8. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 221–2.
9. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 70.
10. Dewey, ‘Education from a Social Perspective’ (1913). MW 7: 125.
11. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 70, 71.
12. Dewey, ‘Social Value of Courses’, Educational Lectures Before Brigham Young
Academy (1902). LW 17: 318.
13. Dewey, ‘The Future of Philosophy’ (1947). LW 17: 467–8.
14. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 51.
15. Dewey, ‘The School as Social Center’ (1902). MW 2: 88.
16. Dewey, ‘Current Tendencies in Education’ (1917). MW 10: 118.
17. Dewey, ‘Democracy and Education in the World of Today’ (1938). LW 13: 301.
18. Dewey, ‘History for the Educator’ (1909). MW 4: 192–3.
19. Dewey, ‘The Way Out of Educational Confusion’ (1931). LW 6: 87.
20. Dewey, How We Think (rev. edn, 1933). LW 8: 147–8, 147.
21. Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (1908). MW 4: 282.
22. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 70–1.
23. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 59.
24. Dewey, ‘Ethical Principles Underlying Education’ (1897). EW 5: 60–1.
25. Ibid., 72.
26. Dewey, ‘The Moral Significance of the Common School Studies’ (1909). MW 4: 208.
27. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 15.
28. Dewey, ‘Conscription of Thought’ (1917). MW 10: 277–8.
29. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 132. Similar statements are found,
for instance, in LW 6: 12, LW 8: 301, LW 12: 159, and LW 13: 329.
30. Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925). LW 1: 40.
31. Michel Foucault, ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview with Michel
Foucault’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 384.
32. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Hubert
L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231.
33. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 208.
34. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage, 1979), 30–1.
35. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, 76–7.
36. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in The Foucault Reader, 46.
37. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 76.
38. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin
Gordon, trans. C. Gordon et. al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 81, 82.
39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194, 27.
40. See especially Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1938) in LW 13.
Chapter 9
Teaching Literature:
Life and Narrative
It is a curious fact that while Dewey held literature and the arts in very high
regard, his educational writings contain remarkably few references to and no
sustained discussion of a literary education. Not a single essay is devoted to
this theme, leaving us to infer from his writings on some related topics what
a Deweyan conception of education in this field would be like. Indeed, one
of the more interesting remarks Dewey would offer on the subject, in an
early essay of 1898, finds him resisting the trend of that time toward the
‘primary-education fetish’ – a trend that was stressing the importance of
learning to read, write, and gain an acquaintance with literature in the first
three years of primary school – precisely on grounds of literature’s impor-
tance:
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life
because of the great information attaching to literature seems to me a per-
version. Just because literature is so important, it is desirable to postpone
the child’s introduction to printed speech until he is capable of appreci-
ating and dealing with its genuine meaning.1
Dewey was well aware of the formative influence of literature and of the
extent to which ‘[t]he real child . . . lives in the world of imaginative values
and ideas’, yet the implications of this for the teaching and learning of
literary works and the aims that properly orient the practice would remain
largely unremarked.2
The aim of this chapter, accordingly, is to identify these implications by
relating Dewey’s various remarks on this subject and a few related issues, thus
articulating a Deweyan philosophy of education as it pertains to literature.
Following the structure of the previous chapters, I shall also bring this phil-
osophy into contact with some more recent views on narrative, particularly
those of Paul Ricoeur, in an effort to advance a step or two beyond Dewey’s
position. I should indicate here that by ‘literature’ I am referring not to the
broader connotation of the word – a category that can encompass the written
word in general – but to works of fiction in particular: essentially novels,
short stories, plays, and poetry. In doing so my intent is neither to resort to
280
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 281
definitional stipulation nor to deny that other senses of the word exist and
ought to exist. Literature as we speak of it today is a word that came into
common use in the nineteenth century, particularly in educational contexts
as the classical canon was beginning to be replaced with texts in the students’
native language. What, the question became, is to replace the great texts of
Greece and Rome in the transition from a classical to a national education?
A word was needed that would allow us to distinguish those works of one’s
native culture that were asserted to be worthy of inclusion in the curriculum
from those that were not, and ‘literature’ seemed to fit this purpose. It thus
acquired an honorific connotation and one not limited to fictional works.
The word, however, has never had an uncontested definition and I have no
intention of introducing one here. My purpose in speaking of literature in
the narrow sense is to suggest that the aims that properly orient the teaching
of fictional texts is a distinct question from the aims of teaching history,
philosophy, science, and other disciplines that are often included under the
umbrella of literature in its broad sense. If we would not only include works
of fiction in the curriculum but, as I shall argue, grant them a more central
place than the current fashion prefers – dominated as it is by the sciences
and mathematics under the influence of political and economic imperatives
– then we must provide a rationale for this view which elucidates what it is
about literature that is properly educational. Fictional works impart little by
way of informational knowledge that students will find useful in later life,
and arguments to the contrary proffered by educational conservatives do a
disservice to literature by reducing its importance to practical use-value.
Whatever its educational significance consists in, it extends far beyond
Hirsch’s cultural literacy or Bloom’s canon for the canon’s sake to include its
power to enrich human experience in a way more profound and enduring
than we usually believe.
Literature forms us, as do the arts in general, and its educational impor-
tance can be satisfactorily understood only when we have realized the
manner and extent to which this is so. The formative influence of literature
is a phenomenon that Plato taught us to see and of which Dewey was also well
aware, even if he did not make it a major theme in his writings on education.
It is an idea that the Bildung tradition in philosophy would also emphasize,
and an idea that accords well with the conception of experience that Dewey
defended. Experience and literature, life and narrative, must be thought in
their mutuality in order that the educational aim might be made explicit.
This is the hypothesis of the present chapter. Encountering literature is
indeed a form of inquiry in Dewey’s sense, yet in a manner that surpasses its
more straightforward forms. The truth into which we are inquiring here is
the truth of the human condition itself, in an expansive sense of the phrase.
Literature teaches by informing us, to be sure, and of matters difficult to
282 Education in the Human Sciences
Choosing literary works that satisfy this hunger may have less to do with iden-
tifying ‘age-appropriate’ material as educational psychology currently under-
stands the phrase than with texts in which students take a spontaneous
interest. Whether we are speaking of children or young adults, all reading
is good reading provided that it engages students’ minds (not only their
educators) and that there is something in the texts that is worthy of such
engagement, something that surpasses entertainment or amusement.
The connection with experience is imperative since in the absence of this
connection there is very little motivation for students to take genuine
interest in what they are studying, and the subject will appear as an external
imposition that gets in the way of everything vital in experience. ‘The prin-
ciple of interest’, as Dewey remarked, ‘is often abused by being reduced to
the concept of amusement, or making something interesting.’ That this is a
distortion of the principle is important to emphasize given the frequency
with which this idea has been mistakenly identified with soft pedagogy.
‘Complete, or organic interest’, he continued, ‘is realized only when the
child puts his entire self into his activity. His activity, even if comparatively
trivial, objectively considered, must appeal to the child as worth while, as
genuine work.’6 It is as futile to teach Shakespeare to the intellectually
immature as to expect entertaining but vacuous material to create a love of
literature. For this happy result to occur, the students’ capacities must be
engaged; they must in a genuine sense be working, and on something of
which they can see the relevance – which always means the experiential
relevance – themselves.
The relevance of literature to life is self-evident to anyone with a basic com-
petence in this area and whose literary education was not marred by poor
instruction or ill-chosen material. As Dewey expressed it, the value of literary
works for education ‘lies in their use to increase the meaning of the things
with which we have actively to do at the present time’, especially as this
pertains to the ‘continuous reconstruction of experience’.7 Literature pos-
sesses the unique ability both to plumb the depths of human experience and,
in the case of the novel, to capture something of its breadth or temporal
extension as well. Experience in Dewey’s organic sense of the word extends
over a considerable portion of time, in contrast with older empiricist views
which had spoken of experiences as discrete units. Experience also has a
consummatory nature, as is evident when we speak of having ‘an’ experience.
An experience in this sense is contrasted with the inchoate and unfulfilled,
that which fails to run its course to completion. Experience that is halting and
discordant Dewey contrasted with that which over time achieves a resolution
to the felt difficulty from which it arose. A conflict resolved, a difficulty
disposed of, a project brought to completion are so many experiences in this
sense. It is the dimension of human experience that is ‘a consummation and
284 Education in the Human Sciences
not a cessation’ to which the literary narrative does justice since it is here that
the long-term consequences of our actions and the implications of the webs
that we weave are depicted in personal and detailed ways.
Dewey’s ‘experiential continuum’ derives from James’ ‘stream of con-
sciousness’, as we have seen.8 Phenomenologically speaking, our experience
reaches forward in time; it leads from one event to the next while connect-
ing with experiences of the past which provide it with an orientation and
purposiveness. An experience may be a means to an end, a result, or a
turning point; it may foreshadow future experiences, constitute a beginning
or an ending, or otherwise fit into a larger temporal configuration. In any
event, it does not stand on its own but ‘flows constantly forward’ and at times
culminates in a conclusion or consummation.9 Dewey’s examples include
aesthetic experiences as well as resolutions of a more mundane kind:
In the hearing of the musical theme, the earlier stages are far from being
mere means to the later; they give the mind a certain set and dispose it to
anticipate later developments. So the end, the conclusion, is not a mere
last thing in time; it completes what has gone before; it settles, so to speak,
the character of the theme as a whole. In the ball game, the interest may
intensify with every passing stage of the game; the last inning finally settles
who wins and who loses, a matter which up to that time has been in
suspense or doubt. In the game, the last stage is not only the last in time,
but also settles the character of the entire game, and so gives meaning to
all that has preceded.10
For Dewey, the idea of culmination points to the essence of aesthetic experi-
ence in particular, a theme that he treated explicitly in Art as Experience.
These are experiences that are important and stand out from the ordinary
course of events in that they constitute a fulfilment of what has gone before
and are complete unto themselves. Characterizing every experience as
organic means that it presses continually forward, is thoroughly connected
with other experiences and with an environment, and is a process that
reaches periodic culminations and new beginnings.
All of this – the larger swath of human experience in all its connections
and significance – is what literature makes apparent, and in ways that
resonate within and transform readers. Interpreting a literary work involves
precisely the search for connections that for Dewey characterizes experience
in general but raised to a higher level. How one passage or episode relates
to another, how the significance of the narrative as a whole emerges from the
parts, how a theme relates to the reader’s own life, and so on, is the business
of the kind of inquiry that is literary interpretation, although it is a kind in
which Dewey himself showed far less interest than inquiry in its more overtly
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 285
scientific forms. The experimental frame of mind that Dewey prized is called
for in the encounter with literature no less (likely more) than in scientific
contexts, while the broadening and deepening of experience that this
encounter brings about is the truest indicator of its educational importance.
Among the achievements of a literary education is undoubtedly the kind
of moral knowledge or social intelligence of which Dewey so often wrote. As
I discussed in Chapter 8, Dewey regarded history as having a special impor-
tance in the cultivation of this kind of knowledge, yet he was not unaware of
literature’s role here as well. If history demonstrates the complexity of
human affairs and the successes and failures of our designs, surely literature
is capable of doing the same. In my view it even surpasses history in this
respect since it is in the works of the great novelists and poets that we come
to understand experience from the inside, as it were, rather than from the
distanced perspective of the historian. Here the reader is called upon to
respond with intelligence and emotion (particularly empathy), to transpose
oneself in imagination into the point of view of the characters, to see
through their eyes, and to resolve their conflicts in a more immediate and
personal way than in historical inquiry. Social intelligence, which Dewey
defined as ‘the power of observing and comprehending social situations’
with an eye to resolving conflicts and remedying moral difficulties, is best
learned when such situations are described in their full complexity to a
reader who does not look on from a distance but identifies in a more
intimate way with the characters undergoing them.11 We live out their con-
flicts, experience their joys and frustrations, and urge them in this direction
or that. We draw lessons from their trials, appropriate certain of their ideas
and traits, apply the meaning that emerges from their lives to our own, in the
process becoming changed in our own way of being.
That literature happens in the imagination rather than in real life is no
drawback for education. Much that is genuinely educative pertains to the
inwardness of the young, to the formation of habits and sensibilities that go
beyond the outwardly useful. Indeed, much that is outwardly useful, includ-
ing the cultivation of moral knowledge, has its basis precisely here: in the
realm of inwardness and imagination, in the comprehension of human
nature and the intangibles of life to which literature and the arts provide
access. How better to learn the skill of moral deliberation than to experience
first-hand the conflicts of a Raskolnikov or an Alyosha Karamazov; how better
to learn something about personal transformation than to transpose oneself
into the point of view of Jean Valjean? As important as history and other
branches of the human sciences undoubtedly are in this respect, none sur-
passes literature in understanding human experience in its manifold
richness and complexity.
Fundamental to the educative process is that the subject matter lift the
286 Education in the Human Sciences
Yet if we judge its nature from the creation of works of art, it designates a
quality that animates and pervades all processes of making and observ-
ation. It is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral
whole. It is the large and generous blending of interests at the point
where the mind comes in contact with the world. When old and familiar
things are made new in experience, there is imagination.13
It is not difficult to see the manner in which literature educates the imagi-
nation and our understanding of the human condition in a more general
way. Whether or not literature educates in the narrow sense of imparting
informational knowledge – knowledge that is likely communicable in non-
literary language – or in another sense, literature undoubtedly educates. It
teaches in ways that are primarily illustrative, indirect, impressionistic, and
specific to particular characters in particular situations but that are no less
important for that. It is hardly deniable that Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punish-
ment educates the moral imagination or that Orwell’s 1984 educates the
social intelligence of readers, yet less obvious is the precise sense in which
this is so. Has Orwell pronounced a valid critique of authoritarianism, a
critique that might equally have found expression in a treatise in political
theory? Has he resolved one of Dewey’s ‘problems of men’? Likely so,
although this understates Orwell’s accomplishment. Has Dostoyevsky
advanced a possibly true hypothesis about morality or criminal psychology?
Perhaps, yet one senses that this way of formulating the question misses the
point. That point is that literature educates the moral imagination, social
intelligence, or some similar capacity. It does so by acquainting readers with
points of view not their own and with experiences that they might not
otherwise have, by undergoing ‘felt difficulties’ from the inside, as it were,
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 287
deliberating about what is to be done, and seeing first hand the conse-
quences of human action. The reader rehearses dramatic situations in imag-
ination while capacities of interpretation, emotional responsiveness, and
deliberation are set to work.
The relevance for literary studies of the following remarks from Democracy
and Education is thus abundantly clear:
Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers
of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously,
but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations.
The main texture of disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by
such influences. What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to
free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some
of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
productive of meaning.14
played out over a span of time and meaning emerges on the basis of active
interrogation of the text. An education that prizes what Dewey called ‘the
power of reflective attention’, meaning ‘the power to hold problems, ques-
tions, before the mind’ in a thoughtful and unhurried way, and that values
‘depth and slowness’ over hasty superficiality, finds perhaps its most
advanced lessons precisely here, where easy answers are nowhere to be found
and genuine understanding requires looking beyond surface meanings.15
If ‘the first product of schooling’, as Dewey expressed it, is the ‘inclination
to learn from life itself’, where better is life in the sense of lived experience
presented in its manifold richness than in the literary work? The fact that
such works present us with a fictional world rather than the ‘real world’ of
common parlance should not cause us to overlook that it is life that litera-
ture and art in general depict, and in a manner that calls upon the reader to
abandon the role of spectator or passive recipient of information and to
become alive to the connections and meanings of which our experience is
replete. Literature does not transport us into a fantasy world of escapism but
acquaints us precisely with the real world in ways that the real world itself,
studied in scientific and practical ways, often cannot. If it is practical matters
with which we are concerned, nothing is more practical than ‘the ability to
learn from experience’, if by this we understand ‘the power to retain from
our experience something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of
a later situation’.16 In the rage to prepare students for the practical life that
awaits them, we cannot overlook that this very preparation includes far more
than what goes under the name of useful information, and includes powers
of perception and judgment, intellectual habits of reflection and creativity,
and the ability – unfortunately rare – to learn from others’ mistakes. This last
value, supposing one were to attempt to instill it directly, is not taught and
learned through preaching but only by the indirect route of acquainting
students with all the foibles of the human character and the consequences
to which they lead. By this means, the students’ powers of judgment are
enhanced; if one learns to judge by judging then let one judge how this char-
acter should have acted in this complex situation, what led to their downfall,
and what we might have done in their place. Let them reflect on the lessons
learned from the ancient tragedies that are of universal human importance
or on modern works that relate more directly to the experience of students.
In either case, provided such narratives be of sufficient quality that there is
something there to interpret, a degree of worldly understanding might be
attained as one becomes habituated to engaging with quality prose, inter-
preting meaning, drawing conclusions, and forming judgments. Knowing
how to negotiate the complexities of life, and to learn from experience itself,
is among the highest achievements of a literary education, and it is a knowl-
edge to which great literature is especially well suited.
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 289
to education for a remedy, hoping that literature and the other arts, com-
petently taught, would instill taste and interests more refined than what had
become the norm.
We have had occasion to see throughout this study the manner in which
Dewey’s philosophy of education coheres with his pragmatic experimental-
ism and how he would always insist on connecting the curriculum with
students’ experience. Stated in such terms, it can appear that Dewey gave us
a conception of education that is excessively practical, one in which an
interest in theory or literature for its own sake is misguided and even the
cultivation of taste is valued only insofar as it brings about a more profitable
use of free time than empty amusement. There may be a grain of truth in this
view, but I would suggest not more than a grain. An education in taste and
perception undoubtedly serves practical ends, yet Dewey also insisted that
education is properly an end in itself. He would also write in How We Think
that ‘[t]here is such a thing, even from the common-sense standpoint, as
being “too practical”, as being so intent upon the immediately practical as
not to see beyond the end of one’s nose or as to cut off the limb upon which
one is sitting’. It is an issue of the limits of the practical and its connections
with that which appears to transcend it: the theoretical, aesthetic, or intel-
lectual. His point is that there are more such connections than meet the eye,
that the art of perception which literature educates has moral consequences,
that taste appropriately cultivated does not turn us into aesthetes but gives us
a range of vision larger than it might otherwise be.
Truly practical men give their minds free play about a subject without
asking too closely at every point for any advantage to be gained. Exclusive
preoccupation with matters of use and application narrows the horizon
and in the long run defeats itself. It does not pay to tether one’s thoughts
to the post of use with too short a rope.20
All the habits of mind about which Dewey cared and which an education
in any branch of the human sciences aims to impart have their practical uses,
even if this is not always self-evident. These uses account in part for their
educational value, but it is a mistake to regard education in any of these
fields as a mere means to an end. The process of cultivating the mind, Dewey
always maintained, requires no justification outside of the process itself. The
worldly uses of a literary education are not inconsiderable, but the cultiv-
ation of taste or imagination is an end in itself, something vital in the life of
the mind, whether one puts it to use in narrowly practical ways (one can
always teach) or not. The fact that university English departments have
produced their share of useless degrees might well be a mark in their favor.
Here, as well as in departments of art, drama, music, and so on, one will still
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 291
find unapologetic spokespersons for the arts who well understand both the
practical and impractical dimensions of their field and its contribution to
students’ lives. All such disciplines are ill served by spokespersons or mar-
keting pitches that make exaggerated claims about practical use-value, their
true value lying in the power of vision and imagination that they cultivate.
Indeed, miseducation in its many forms often stems from the view that the
curriculum must directly serve practical ends in a sense narrower than what
Dewey spoke of, that ultimately its purpose is to prepare students for the life
that awaits them upon graduation. Usually of course this means the life of
economic production and little besides. Hence the ubiquitous question
asked of all students of literature and the arts: ‘What are you going to do with
your degree?’ Let us think about this question and what it presupposes.
There is the clear assumption that only tangible matters count, that an
answer that speaks of the virtues of mind alone – still more as ends in them-
selves – will not do. There is also the assumption that education not only is a
means to an end but that the end in question is gainful employment. These
assumptions are readily understandable in courses of study with a clearly
practical orientation, but that they apply everywhere is a different propos-
ition. In one fashion or another, what looks from a Deweyan point of view
like miseducation typically proceeds on these assumptions – that students
who do not retain the right information in the right quantity will have no
future in the labor market, or that they will lack the ‘cultural literacy’ that is
another name for economic readiness and cultural sameness. That ‘things of
the spirit do not lend themselves easily to that kind of external inspection
which goes by the name of examination’ – still less standardized examination
concerned with memorized information – is an insight of Dewey’s that we
would do well to bear in mind.21 Being intangibles, matters of the spirit
transcend examination in its more straightforward, quantitative forms at
least. The multiple-choice examination, for instance, is a travesty in the study
of literature for the same reasons as in other fields of the human sciences: it
fails utterly to get beneath the surface of things and to test the students’
understanding of what they read. Things of the spirit likewise transcend
informational knowledge and what the excessively practical minded intend
by good education.
Hirsch is an example of this latter group. What might have given cultural
literacy some plausibility is that as a slogan it conjures up images of all that
constitutes higher culture and brings them into proximity with literacy in its
ordinary connotation – the ability to read and write. The culturally literate,
one might think, are those with a broad and perhaps deep understanding of
the culture of which they are a part – until we learn what Hirsch intends by
the phrase. Where the study of literature is concerned, it should be obvious
that the kind of learning that takes place far transcends factual knowledge or
292 Education in the Human Sciences
interests, point of view, and cultural heritage that readers bring with them in
interpretation.22 One can read well or badly, of course, but this never means
that in the former case one ascertains the objective truth – perhaps, as
Hirsch also believes, by discovering the author’s intention – while in the
latter one does not. The Deweyan objection to this practice is less hermeneu-
tical than educational: the nature of education is to inquire, and to do so
without presupposing that anyone, be it teacher or student, possesses special
insight into the truth. In literary interpretation, for instance, we are inquir-
ing on a common basis into the meaning(s) of a text. As an inquirer, the
educator will undoubtedly have a view, and often an eminently well-founded
one, yet Dewey’s point is that no matter how much of an expert the educator
becomes, he or she does not stand above the fray of inquiry but must submit
interpretations in a fallibilist spirit and allow students to examine their
merits. Students must never be put in the role of spectators or passive recip-
ients of information that has been altogether predigested.
A related form of miseducation finds the teacher in the role of zealot,
whether it be in service to a particular literary theory, a political ideology, or
what have you. An important example of this is the political correctness
phenomenon which has had a ruinous effect on education everywhere it has
been practiced, and nowhere more so than in the study of literature. What
this movement fails to realize is that from an educational standpoint it
matters not at all whether the orthodoxy one would instill is of the left or the
right, whether it is political or religious, or for that matter whether it is true
or false. Orthodoxy and indoctrination in all their forms are anathema from
the standpoint of inquiry. Teaching students to be critical does not mean
transforming them into crusaders of ‘anti-oppression’ or disciples of one
kind or another. It does not mean seeing to it that students adopt a particular
way of thinking but that whatever views they uphold can be backed up with
intelligent arguments. The well-educated mind is flexible and searching; no
matter the strength of its convictions, it remains resolutely open to any ideas
that would challenge them. Political correctness has shown itself to be as
heavy-handed and doctrinaire as any of the views that it opposes, and in edu-
cational settings has created an atmosphere less of ‘inclusiveness’ than of
ideology and absolutism. Overheated debates regarding the politics of the
canon have accomplished far less than is often claimed. What matters from
an educational point of view is not whether the author of a literary work is
male or female, black or white, or what have you, but whether their work
speaks to the experience of students and, if properly interpreted, leads them
beyond the parochial and mundane into a fictional world that can extend
their horizons and leave them transformed. It is not the case that canonical
works are inherently educational while non-canonical works are not, or vice
versa. ‘There is no such thing’, as Dewey remarked, ‘as educational value in
294 Education in the Human Sciences
the abstract.’23 A text takes on such value when it serves the larger purposes
of education, not when it serves the political designs of educators or
governments. When the classroom becomes a battlefield in the culture wars
and literature a tool of ‘political struggle’ and ‘resistance’, it is fairly certain
that education will not be the result.
Miseducation can take additional forms as well, of course, but these are a
few of the more important forms that a Deweyan view can bring to light.
Literary studies can also deteriorate into scholasticism and empty formalism.
They can fail to connect with students’ experience and make the world of
literature appear as a pompous form of escapism. They can cover too much
ground too quickly, instilling habits of skimming and understanding texts
only at a surface level. They can ask too little of students by presenting them
with ready-made interpretations which students need not question or by not
requiring them to develop a command of the language through written
work. Other examples could be mentioned, but I shall stop here. What must
now be examined, or re-examined, is the connection between life and liter-
ature that for Dewey accounts for the latter’s educational importance. There
may be grounds for regarding this relation as still more intimate than Dewey
believed.
Life as narrative
A twentieth-century philosopher with whom Dewey has rather more in
common than one might expect is Paul Ricoeur. While references to Dewey
in Ricoeur’s writings are nowhere to be found, these two profoundly dialec-
tical thinkers share much in terms not only of their substantive positions on
certain issues but of the way in which these two figures habitually
approached philosophical questions – by resolutely rejecting the standard
dichotomies of modern thought and pursuing an essentially phenomeno-
logical inquiry which typically operates in the interstices of binary opposi-
tions. Both thinkers preferred to speak of continuity over discontinuity, and
when confronted with some polarity or other typically defended a position
of both/and or neither/nor. This holds for both figures on the question of
the relation between life and literature – Dewey, as we have seen, emphasiz-
ing the fundamental mutuality of the two, and Ricoeur, while arguing much
the same, taking the argument a few steps beyond where Dewey left us. I wish
therefore to bring Ricoeur’s argument into contact with Dewey’s own views,
a line of thought that may render more explicit the connection between
experience and narrative and thereby the purpose of a literary education.
In what does the relation between the lived experience of students, or for
that matter any human being, and narrative consist? A second question may
give us a clue to the first: What explains the universal fascination with narra-
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 295
childhood while the possibilities of who they might become are informed by
a particular cast of ancient characters? Every believer knows which characters
on whom they ought to model their lives, which characters not to become,
what to aspire toward and what to condemn. The same is true of lovers of lit-
erature, popular culture, or narratives in general. Be it in its higher or lower
forms, narrative affords the basic structure in which our self-understanding
emerges and our lives gain a direction or orientation.
It is in this way that we may appropriate Plato’s insight that narrative forms
the soul and is a matter for educators and political rulers both to regard with
great seriousness. Plato, of course, appealed to this insight in making the
classical case for censoring the tales to which the young were to be exposed
in his ideal city. The censorship issue is not one I shall take up here, but the
insight itself is of enduring importance: the human character is profoundly
influenced and indeed formed for good or ill by the narratives to which it is
exposed, most obviously at an impressionable age, but not only then. It will
not do, Plato reasoned, for guardians of the state to hear stories about heroes
and gods acting in reprehensible ways lest they become reprehensible them-
selves, as they are likely to do. Tales about the gods in particular must depict
the latter as virtuous in their deeds not only because they are virtuous in
truth but because narratives depicting them as such mold the character in
desirable ways. In phenomenological terms, narratives provide the self with
possibilities of character and plot-lines that establish a preliminary set to
one’s existence. While it overstates the point to say that one becomes what
one reads – since there is always freedom in choosing which literary charac-
ters one shall emulate, in what ways and to what extent, and also because the
human character is not formed by stories alone – it remains that the self is
not a raw given but a malleable construction and self-construction of a kind,
one that ‘becomes what it is’, as Nietzsche would say. It becomes this in con-
tinual interaction with its culture, including not least the products of literary
culture by which it learns the various forms that our existence can take.
It is a familiar experience, of course, to have one’s life and self-
understanding profoundly transformed not only by experience but by
vicarious experience of the kind that literature provides. Everyone, one
might say, ought to have had their life changed profoundly by at least two or
three great novels read carefully and at a mature age, rather than remain
confined throughout life within storylines encountered in childhood. In
important ways life does indeed imitate art, sometimes in reflective ways and
sometimes unreflectively, at times by choice and at others through manipu-
lation. Narratives that serve as mere vehicles of political or religious indoc-
trination for the young remain unfortunately commonplace and can pose as
great an obstacle to maturity as the questionable beliefs that they instill.
Children’s literature, for instance, that has been chastened by political cor-
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 299
Our own existence cannot be separated from the account we can give of
ourselves. It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity.
We recognize ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves. It makes
very little difference whether these stories are true or false, fiction as well
as verifiable history provides us with an identity.29
claim first. In what sense is it true that our lived experience is told or
recounted in the fashion of a story rather than simply lived? What the
narrative theory of the self proposes is that there is an analogy, not an
identity relation, between life and narrative, that our interest in stories
is therefore rooted in our ontological condition as beings whose self-
understanding is mediated by narrative interpretation. To claim that life is
recounted, accordingly, is meant not to deny the self-evident truth that life is
lived but to describe phenomenologically the manner in which it is lived. It
is essentially by understanding itself and its world that the human being lives
and copes with its experience. As Heidegger observed, the human being is a
being-in-the-world, where the world is the lifeworld of language, culture, and
a network of social practices that together represent our historical inheri-
tance and that constitute us as beings of a particular kind. The human being,
to this way of thinking, is not only a rational animal but an understanding
animal, while its self-understanding takes the form of narrative: I am the
person who did and experienced this, that, and the other thing, and who
projects a future for myself that consists of a particular set of possibilities and
aspirations. I am in short who I have been and who I expect to become. An
unnarrated life is a life that is without self-understanding, and is as fully
undesirable as what Socrates called the unexamined life, from which it little
differs. As Ricoeur put it, ‘fiction contributes to making life, in the biologi-
cal sense of the word, a human life’. Otherwise stated, ‘A life is no more than
a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted. And in
interpretation, fiction plays a mediating role.’32 Whether we are speaking of
individual actions or experience as a whole, understanding happens when
we are able to situate events within a temporal and narrative sequence which
supplies the larger context of our lives. An unnarrated life would consist of
a series of unrelated events, resembling more a chronicle than a history,
and lacking a sense of direction. It is precisely when our lives are in this
unnarrated condition that we complain that we no longer understand our-
selves, that our lives have become disconnected and without purpose since
there is no followable thread that connects our past with our present and
future or that in some fashion draws together the different facets of our lives.
The second part of Ricoeur’s reply to the objection is to state that, while
narratives are indeed recounted, they are also lived. To see what Ricoeur
meant by this we must consider for a moment his notion of emplotment.
Fashioning a plot, we commonly think, is the work of the author alone, while
the reader’s job is to follow the course of events as the author has arranged
them. The error in this view is to underestimate the role of the reader not
only in interpretation but in emplotment as well. Plot itself, in Ricoeur’s
words, ‘is not a static structure but an operation, an integrating process,
which . . . is completed only in the reader or in the spectator, that is to say,
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 301
Notes
1. Dewey, ‘The Primary-Education Fetish’ (1898). EW 5: 264.
2. Dewey, The School and Society (1899). MW 1: 37.
3. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 169, 86.
4. Dewey, ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’ (1917). MW 10: 7.
5. Dewey, ‘How the Mind Learns’, Educational Lectures Before Brigham Young
Academy (1901). LW 17: 215.
6. Dewey, ‘Plan of Organization of the University Primary School’ (1895). EW 5: 228.
7. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 86.
8. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 17.
9. Dewey, ‘Three Contemporary Philosophers’ (1920). MW 12: 210.
10. Dewey, Interest and Effort in Education (1913). MW 7: 166–7.
11. Dewey, Ethics (1908). MW 5: 285.
Teaching Literature: Life and Narrative 303
Index
acculturation, 2, 37, 43, 45, 46. Also 117, 118, 128, 168, 175, 185, 186,
see culture. 187, 268, 269, 300. Also see accul-
aesthetic experience, 133, 136. Also see turation; tradition.
literary education. curiosity, 43, 44, 77, 78, 79, 160
Arendt, Hannah, 222–31
Aristotle, 44, 56, 57, 60, 73, 150, 186, Darling, John and Nordenbo, Sven
224, 228, 229–30, 255 Erik, 14, 49n2
autonomy, 2, 3, 15, 21, 25. Also see Descartes, René, 61, 160
freedom. Dewey, John
as dialectical thinker, 17, 19, 38, 39,
Beiner, Ronald, 224 54, 67, 112
Bildung, 8, 22, 45, 46, 90–5, 281, 302 influence of, 19–20, 23
Bloom, Allan, 5, 16, 27–32, 48, 50n4, on democracy and education, 46,
50n20, 162 79, 121, 150, 155, 190, 197, 213,
Bridges, David and Jonathon, Ruth, 24 233–45
Briton, Derek, 50n15 dialogue, 8, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 110,
Burbules, Nicholas, 48 111, 120–1, 134, 165, 166, 167,
197–198, 215, 246–55, 274
canon, 16, 28, 31, 32, 38, 47, 49, 281, difference, 214, 244
293 discipline, 215–16, 232n17
Caputo, John, 198–207 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 285, 286, 287,
Carr, David, 15 289, 292
conservative education, 13–49, 119,
183, 186 Edmondson, Henry, 16, 20, 49n1,
continuity and interaction, 72–5, 93, 50n4, 278n1
162, 287–8 education as art, 25, 26, 46, 47
Copernican revolution, 52–95 education as end, 26, 28, 44
corporate scientism, 20–21, 23, 24, 25, education as means, 3, 22, 25, 27, 42,
27, 28, 47, 262 76, 185, 196, 290, 291
creativity, 5, 27, 157 education as science, 14, 15, 23, 25, 26,
critical thinking, 4, 16, 21, 30, 31, 37, 46, 47
38, 44, 102, 118, 120, 140, 156, 157, educational theory, 1, 6, 14, 21, 26, 41,
254, 261, 262, 271, 276. Also see 49, 52, 53, 93, 149–151, 184
thinking. educative process, 1, 3, 8, 25, 28, 38,
culture, 8, 25, 30, 33, 35, 36, 45, 90, 94, 39–49, 52, 81, 233
305
306 Index
Egan, Kieran, 16, 49n1, 50n4, 278n1 129, 292. Also see Gadamer;
empiricism, British, 61–2, 64, 93, 106, Ricoeur.
110, 114 Hirsch, E. D., 28, 32–8, 48, 49n1, 50n4,
empiricism, radical, 62, 63, 64, 65, 93, 94, 140, 162, 258, 263, 287, 291,
114, 268 292, 293
Erfahrung, 81–95, 132, 138 historical education, 221–2, 245,
Erlebnis, 81–95 257–78
ethical education, 210–31, 268, 285 historical sense, 265–6, 268, 269, 276,
experience, 3, 4, 8, 15, 19, 28, 37, 41, 277, 278
43, 44, 52–95, 114, 118, 133, 159, historically effected consciousness,
160, 203, 239, 262, 281, 283, 284. 88–90
Also see Erfahrung; Erlebnis; experi- Hobbes, Thomas, 62
mental inquiry. Hook, Sidney, 20
experimental inquiry, 4, 8, 19, 40, 42, Hugo, Victor, 285
43, 45, 59–75, 82, 104, 106, 106–20, Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 90
122, 128, 133, 134, 135, 136, 141, Hume, David, 62
189, 194, 214, 240, 241. Also see Husserl, Edmund, 124, 127
experience; thinking.
expertise, 5, 23, 43, 132, 139, 241, 293 imagination, 118, 217–18, 220, 225,
228, 241, 267, 285–291, 297
Foucault, Michel, 23, 260, 270–8 inculcation and indoctrination, 2, 105,
freedom, 25, 34, 71, 93, 103, 121, 122, 123, 167, 184, 189, 191, 197, 206,
164, 165, 178, 179, 189, 194, 195, 234, 235, 252, 293
215–16, 217, 236, 251. Also see information, 4, 7, 15, 16, 21, 22, 32, 33,
autonomy. 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 47, 54, 55,
Freire, Paulo, 245–55, 274 105, 107, 236, 237, 263, 282, 292
intellectual agency, 5, 7, 8, 25. Also see
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 22–3, 42, 45, intellectual virtues.
46, 83–95, 136, 301. Also see intellectual virtues, 4, 48, 76–81, 111,
hermeneutics. 113, 167, 192, 193, 240, 264. Also
Gallagher, Shaun, 16, 51n43 see intellectual agency.
Geertz, Clifford, 36 interest, 19, 67, 68, 70, 98n39, 122,
Good, James A., 51n45, 97n24 239, 283
grades, 123–4, 269
Green, T. H., 63, 144n76 James, William, 47, 62, 63, 64, 97n28,
106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 124, 125,
habit, 46, 62, 73–74, 98n49, 113, 191, 126, 143n31, 284
192, 289 Jaspers, Karl, 48
Hegel, G. W. F., 8, 45–6, 62, 63, 90, 91, Jay, Martin, 82–3, 85, 90
172, 268 Johnston, James Scott, 50n19, 99n69
Heidegger, Martin, 5, 23, 28, 31, judgment, 5, 48, 78, 79, 91, 215,
50n20, 81–2, 85, 95, 107, 116, 117, 222–31, 237, 241, 253, 255, 288
127, 128–42, 300
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 90 Kant, Immanuel, 61, 127, 172, 219,
hermeneutics, 26, 36, 45, 117, 128, 223–31
Index 307
Kearney, Richard, 295, 302 63, 64, 103, 117, 126, 186
Kerby, Anthony, 299 philosophical education, 149–80
Kilpatrick, William H., 18, 39 Plato, 1, 3, 45, 60, 73, 101, 134,
149–50, 166, 186, 233, 281, 298, 299
Laboratory School, 18, 58 political correctness, 164, 253–4, 255,
language, 116, 117, 118, 128, 129, 137, 268, 293, 298
186, 268, 300 political education, 233–55
literatary education, 29, 135–136, postmodernism/poststructuralism, 36,
280–302 197–207
Lyotard, Jean-François, 21–2, 27, 295 pragmatism. See experimental inquiry;
truth.
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 299 preparation for later life, 40, 57, 196
Marcel, Gabriel, 135, 145n88 process, 105, 123, 124, 134, 253
method, 5, 23, 25, 27, 45, 49, 88, 102, progressive education, 13–49, 52, 54,
105, 108, 128, 130–2, 139, 140, 142, 71, 216
157 psychology, 2, 13, 15, 47
Mill, John Stuart, 79, 223
Montessori, Maria, 99n63 reflection, 5, 6, 37, 46, 49, 77, 103,
Moore, G. E., 97n28, 106, 124 112–120, 129, 131–3, 139, 241, 266,
Morris, George Sylvester, 144n76 287
multiple-choice tests, 162, 269, 277–8, religious education, 183–207
291 Ricoeur, Paul, 294–302
mystery, 134–5, 141, 202 rules, 103, 104, 108, 128, 139, 140, 141,
157, 212, 218–19, 223, 227, 229
narrative, 86, 93, 280, 294–302 Russell, Bertrand, 97n28, 106, 124,
narrative self, 86, 294–302 149, 153, 180n9
neoliberalism, 245–6
scholasticism, 80, 152, 178, 258–9, 294
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28, 31, 50n20, 54, science, 7, 23, 25, 26, 82, 95, 107, 108,
127, 130, 137, 169–80, 272, 298 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 178, 235,
open-mindedness, 43, 46, 78, 81, 87, 262, 276, 295. Also see technology.
89, 167, 293 Scott, Walter, 292
Orwell, George, 286 self-understanding, 43, 44, 45, 86,
outcomes, 21, 24, 26, 47 295–6, 300, 301
overspecialization, 79, 80, 119, 120, Socrates, 46, 162, 170
154, 158, 168, 177, 259 standardization, 26, 34, 47, 93
standardized tests, 32, 33, 34, 37, 49,
participation, 4, 25, 31, 37, 43, 45, 46, 93, 94, 139, 277–8, 291
49, 89, 105, 121, 243, 254, 255 Stenstad, Gail, 137
passion, 79, 200–1, 202, 204, 205
Peirce, C. S., 107, 110, 111, 112, 116, technology, 6, 21, 23, 129, 130, 131,
143n30 139, 262. Also see science.
performativity, 22, 26, 27, 41, 49, 139, thinking, 4–5, 6, 26, 34, 37, 47, 55,
262 95, 101–42, 156, 163, 169.
phenomenology, 6, 8, 9, 26, 36, 39, 43, Also see critical thinking;
308 Index