The first time I met Chris Lehmann, one of the things we talked about was the notion that educators shouldn’t just read John Dewey; from time to time they should reread Dewey to keep in mind his ideas about the experiences that truly teach us. I nodded my head, finished my dissertation, and while I have reread a couple of essays in the 6 years since, I have not really sat down and reacquainted myself with the work.
So I was pretty happy when I saw that Zac Chase was blogging his experiences reading Dewey’s Experience and Education in a series of posts at his blog, Autodizactic. I decided to take the invitation and reread the book along with his series. I tended to focus more on Democracy and Education, and to a lesser extent Art as Experience and The Quest for Certainty, but as I decipher my notes from the margins I can see that I made use of this text as well. 🙂
In the opening post in his series, Zac sets out a number of themes.
First, he establishes the division in education theory; in Dewey’s time he described this as between “traditionalists” and “progressives.” But even as he used those labels, Dewey warned of the trap of Either-Or thinking, where every issue gets divided into two extremes with no room for nuance. Interestingly, Zac says that this “sets up the battle of progressives and traditionalists (today’s reformers).” The way that Zac sets that sentence up, it suggests that the people who most frequently call themselves education reformers really have a very old idea idea about education and want to find ways to return to an older status quo. If I’m reading him right, I agree with him. This is the sense I’ve gotten from President Obama when I hear him talk about education. His grandmother got a strong enough education in high school to be be able to support a career in the banking industry, and his mother made him get up early to do more studying when he was a kid living in Indonesia. When I see the president support things like longer school days and “career-ready standards,” it feels to me like he’s trying to recreate this experience for others, in part because it worked reasonably well for his family. But there is a weird angle to this for me, in that the title of reformer implies that one wants to change something, and from my own experience I wonder when the traditionalist view was ever out of fashion enough that one could change anything by returning to it. (More on that in a second.)
Second, Zac distinguishes between Dewey’s actual position and the caricature so often made of Dewey and “progressive” education in general. While the caricature says that Dewey and other pragmatists believe that anything goes and whatever works for you is true, the truth is that Dewey was perfectly willing to have rules and systems in schools and learning so long as those rules and systems actually help people get someplace. How do we know about what will get us someplace? Well, that’s detailed at great length in the other works I mentioned, but even in this book Dewey wants to talk about a definition for experience. And it’s not surprising that Dewey is looking for something that is overlooked by both sides of the theoretical argument – since those sides are trapped in the Either-Or thinking, they’ve lost the ability to look for what actually works. In rereading, I took note of Dewey’s statement in the preface:
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that is unwillingly controlled by them.
Dewey kept looking for that new ground that wasn’t boxed in by theoretical assumptions, and I think Zac is right that we should continue to prioritize that today.
Finally, Zac asks a question that I started asking when I first dove into pragmatic philosophy over a decade ago: if Dewey was able to tell us all of this in the time from 1890 to 1940, why have we done so little to implement these ideas in the 21st century? That tied back to my point about traditionalists rebranding themselves as reformers. Maybe you could make the case that Dewey’s ideas were and are influential within the academic field of education theory. But in the world of education practice, one that is still controlled by politicians and by citizens elected to school boards, I don’t think these ideas ever took hold. They were, and are, a radical change from the way human beings thought of education for so long. From time to time we can see those ideas implemented to one degree or another, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make them mainstream. That’s why I’m glad there are so many teachers/writers/theorists who are making the argument outside of academia, in their schools, on Twitter, on their blogs, and in the ongoing educational debate. Maybe in another few decades, we won’t still be scratching our heads and wondering why Dewey’s questions are still so valid.