According to Dewey educational theory is scarred by Either-Or opposition that is a development from within and formation from without and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclinations and substituting in its place habits required under external pressures. The latter view is what students object to most. It is degrading to their “material endowments.” What many teachers do not seem to realize is that students do have endowment and that it is the function of the teacher to steer these toward fulfilment. That teachers think they have exclusive rights to insight tragically prevails.
When students pause at the crossroads and lean toward the one “less traveled by,” they are pushed onto the other, lest they trip-off somewhere in the untried. If a student is enrolled in a philosophy course but is not bent toward becoming excruciatingly dialectic, surely that student should be respected nonetheless for his honest probing, his sincere effort to get at the truth in a way that is comfortable, but with intellectual integrity, to him. For a student to be denied a field of study as sprawling as philosophy is absurd when that student demonstrates ability in handling discourse on understanding areas that deviate from the predetermined tract of experts.
Though I may not think too highly of J. S. Mill as a philosopher, his effort in forging utilitarianism is admirable and his inquiry poses some valid arguments. He certainly does not deserve the butchery some university professors of philosophy perpetrate on him. Those thus inclined should conserve their butchery to the education department. Small wonder Santayana is not in vogue among most of today’s philosophers; I’m willing to wager that Paul Weiss
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has read him:
.He who is occupied with knowledge is not engaged in producing art, but he can deal with art; thought to be sure only in intellectual terms, and even take it to be a special way of cognizing. At the same time he can recognize that knowledge, from the perspective of art is a kind of creative act and even a special type of fine which reveals rather than communicates enriches rather in informs.
And surely Santayana showed respect for another enterprise — as did Plato — by indulging in poetic treatment of philosophy.
Viewing Dewey from this perspective of art is not my intent here but his statement of external pressures brings to mind the universal plight of institutions’ symbiotic paranoia. I therefore recommend reading “The Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s Bros. K for all teachers — particularly most professors of philosophy. Though not “informative” with respect to practicum, I trust they will find it provoking and revealing.
Dewey’s quarrel with traditional learning is simply that it “imposes adult standards on subject-matter and methods” far above the capacities of the young. Dewey would have been delighted with Weiss’ perception — a child is a child. Moreover, under the stifling system it is assumed the future would be like the past in spite of an ever-changing society.
Dewey’s contention is to think positive; that there is a “fundamental unity between the process of actual experience and education.” For instance, rejection of external authority does not mean rejection of authority per se but a philosophical search for a more sensitive and effective authority that would bring about contact between authority and immaturity; past knowledge [what knowledge isn’t past?] should be treated as a means of crystallizing present knowledge and experience in order to deal effectively with the future.
In the “meaning of purpose,” Dewey gives shape to experience and puts an end to the critics of “improvisation by the design of experience.
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Thus in organizing subject-matters the teacher must keep purpose in mind and stress the causal relationship of subject matter to experience and further organize activities by analysis and synthesis to safeguard against aimless activity. Dewey does not discount the shaping agent of adult wisdom; for it is still the adult who interprets with love what it is a child should learn in becoming a child. The teacher transvalues this love to empathy and further channels the child’s random acts with relatively purposeful actions in a wider world. The significance of treating a child as a child and not as an embryonic adult is simply to note his immaturity and accept this as a natural state, even though society pressures the child to mature rapidly, favoring the child that does. For if a child is to have a future it must enjoy the present.
With the perennial misgivings concerning public education, increasingly statistical and behavioristic analyses flood the dialogue. If a machine or machine-like program of instruction can elicit a machine-like response from students, then education can truly justify its huge expenditures; for that is the end-all of a cybernetic style structure simply to prove statistically that there is a minimum of “waste” in energy consumed between the activity of input and output. After all, what does it matter that the invasion of bell-curves, behavioristic terminology and terminal teaching units geared to pretests, diagnosis, prescription and post-tests is but sound and fury aimed at stripping education as flesh and blood in its wholeness by dissecting nerve responses to stimuli?
Thankfully the teacher is the line of defense to insure that cybernetics is but a supplemental tool in the formation of students who need interpersonal relations, together with empathic instructional authority for sets of learning to bring forth new identity by peeling off infantile trusts and mistrusts. A successful teacher must intuitively and naturally balance the negative and positive agents of identity by reinforcing subtle infusions such as autonomy is anarchy without infusion of doubt and shame; blind trust is naiveté without an element of mistrust; initiative without an autonomous forum is a form of tyranny; identity without egalitarian spirit is authoritarianism.
John Dewey is missed but much needed in today’s educational and political environment.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: August 13, 2004.