Democracy and Education

1
Democracy and Education

• Week 2
• Deweys Democratic Conception of Education
• Each generation is inclined to educate its young
  so as to get along in the present world instead
  of with a view to the proper end of education
  the promotion of the best possible realization of
  humanity as humanity. (Dewey, 7.5)

2
John Dewey

• For Dewey society should not be considered a
  failure simply because it does not fit with
  notions of an ideal society.
• He is actively non-Platonic in terms of his
  challenging of classes and externally or
  hierarchically imposed aims.
• For him, society is made up of many smaller
  societies with conflicting interests, which
  compete for accommodation.
• Cities, for example, are congeries of loosely
  associated societies.

3
Congeries of Loosely Associated Societies

• Within every larger social organization there
  are numerous minor groups not only political
  subdivisions, but industrial, scientific,
  religious, associations. There are political
  parties with differing aims, social sets,
  cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships,
  groups bound closely together by ties of blood,
  and so on in endless variety. In many modern
  states and in some ancient, there is great
  diversity of populations, of varying languages,
  religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
  standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of
  our large cities, for example, is a congeries of
  loosely associated societies, rather than an
  inclusive and permeating community of action and
  thought. (Dewey, 7.1)

4
Ideal Society?

• If it is said that such organizations are not
  societies because they do not meet the ideal
  requirements of the notion of society, the
  answer, in part, is that the conception of
  society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no
  use, having no reference to facts and in part,
  that each of these organizations, no matter how
  opposed to the interests of other groups, has
  something of the praiseworthy qualities of
  "Society" which hold it together. (ibid.)

5
Societies Which Actually Exist

• Deweys pragmatic and realist political emphasis
  was on societies which actually exist.
• His aspirations for democratic society attempted
  to take advantage of the differing interests of
  individuals and groups and use them to the
  progressive benefit of society as a whole.
• We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we
  regard as an ideal society. We must base our
  conception upon societies which actually exist,
  in order to have any assurance that our ideal is
  a practicable one. (ibid.)

6
The Elimination of Distance as the Expansion of
Horizons

• For Dewey, breaking down boundaries between
  groups helped to expand the productive context
  that exists within society.
• Every expansive era in the history of mankind
  has coincided with the operation of factors which
  have tended to eliminate distance between peoples
  and classes previously hemmed off from one
  another. Even the alleged benefits of war, so far
  as more than alleged, spring from the fact that
  conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse
  between them and thus accidentally enables them
  to learn from one another, and thereby to expand
  their horizons. (ibid.)

7
Democracy and Education

• The relationship between democracy and education
  is clarified succinctly by Dewey when he writes
• The devotion of democracy to education is a
  familiar fact. The superficial explanation is
  that a government resting upon popular suffrage
  cannot be successful unless those who elect and
  who obey their governors are educated. Since a
  democratic society repudiates the principle of
  external authority, it must find a substitute in
  voluntary disposition and interest these can be
  created only by education. (Dewey, 7.2)

8
Platos Undemocratic Education

• In contrast to this he challenges (but also
  accepts the benefits of) Platos preferred
  society and education
• We cannot better Plato's conviction that an
  individual is happy and society well organized
  when each individual engages in those activities
  for which he has a natural equipment, nor his
  conviction that it is the primary office of
  education to discover this equipment to its
  possessor and train him for its effective use.
  But progress in knowledge has made us aware of
  the superficiality of Plato's lumping of
  individuals and their original powers into a few
  sharply marked-off classes it has taught us that
  original capacities are indefinitely numerous and
  variable. It is but the other side of this fact
  to say that in the degree in which society has
  become democratic, social organization means
  utilization of the specific and variable
  qualities of individuals, not stratification by
  classes. (Dewey, 7.3)

9
Economic and National borders to the Social Ends
of Education

• Economic and national differences put limits on
  the ability for democracy and democratic
  education to reach its full potential. His
  emphasis on common ends is similar to Platos
  focus on the good but for him must come from
  the ground up
• Is it possible for an educational system to be
  conducted by a national state and yet the full
  social ends of the educative process not be
  restricted, constrained, and corrupted?
  Internally, the question has to face the
  tendencies, due to present economic conditions,
  which split society into classes some of which
  are made merely tools for the higher culture of
  others. Externally, the question is concerned
  with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of
  patriotism, with superior devotion to the things
  which unite men in common ends, irrespective of
  national political boundaries. (Dewey, 7.5)

10
Undesirable Society

• Dewey sets down his definitions for desirable and
  undesirable societies as follows
• An undesirable society, in other words, is one
  which internally and externally sets up barriers
  to free intercourse and communication of
  experience. A society which makes provision for
  participation in its good of all its members on
  equal terms and which secures flexible
  readjustment of its institutions through
  interaction of the different forms of associated
  life is in so far democratic. Such a society must
  have a type of education which gives individuals
  a personal interest in social relationships and
  control, and the habits of mind which secure
  social changes without introducing disorder.
  (Dewey, 7.S)

11
Aims as facilitative

• The aims of education in terms of a desirable
  society would be to facilitate individual
  interest and positive social functions
• Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the
  observations, anticipations, and arrangements
  required in carrying on a function -- whether
  farming or educating. Any aim is of value so far
  as it assists observation, choice, and planning
  in carrying on activity from moment to moment and
  hour to hour if it gets in the way of the
  individual's own common sense ( as it will surely
  do if imposed from without or accepted on
  authority ) it does harm. (Dewey, 8.3)
• This is as opposed to externally imposed aims
  (see next slide..)

12
Externally imposed aims

• The vice of externally imposed ends has deep
  roots. Teachers receive them from superior
  authorities these authorities accept them from
  what is current in the community. The teachers
  impose them upon children. As a first
  consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is
  not free it is confined to receiving the aims
  laid down from above. Too rarely is the
  individual teacher so free from the dictation of
  authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods,
  prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let
  his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's
  mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the
  teacher's experience is then reflected in lack of
  confidence in the responses of pupils. 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 democratic criterion of the intrinsic
  significance of every growing experience is
  recognized, we shall be intellectually confused
  by the demand for adaptation to external aims.
  (Dewey, 8.3)

13
A True Aim

• True aims must be related directly to actual
  experience of those being educated in that
  moment.
• For Dewey, focusing on the present in terms of
  aims is, perhaps paradoxically, better for the
  future.
• 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. (Dewey, 8.S)

14
Definition of Culture

• Dewey defines culture and its relation to
  education as follows
• a social efficiency which is defined in terms
  of rendering external service to others is of
  necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the
  meaning of experience, while a culture which is
  taken to consist in an internal refinement of a
  mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But
  social efficiency as an educational purpose
  should mean cultivation of power to join freely
  and fully in shared or common activities. This is
  impossible without culture, while it brings a
  reward in culture, because one cannot share in
  intercourse with others without learning --
  without getting a broader point of view and
  perceiving things of which one would otherwise be
  ignorant. And there is perhaps no better
  definition of culture than that it is the
  capacity for constantly expanding the range and
  accuracy of one's perception of meanings.
  (Dewey, 9.S)

15
References

• Chapters 7-9 from Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and
  Education
• http//www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/
  digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter07.html
• http//www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/
  digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter08.html
• http//www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/
  digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter09.html
• Whole text here http//www.ilt.columbia.edu/publi
  cations/dewey.html
• Ryan, A. (1995) John Dewey and the High Tide of
  American Liberalism London Norton
• Westbrook, R.B. (1991) John Dewey and American
  Democracy London Cornell University Press