Dewey's Empowering Ideals

EDU 6120 Week 8

During the foreword of Parker Palmer’s compelling and contemplative The Courage to Teach, he bemoans the current state of American education plagued by standardized testing and false accountability measures. To illuminate his point, he offers an anecdote from education scholar and philosopher John Dewey. Dewey, who grew up on a farm, noted how curious a system his parents used to determine to value of their pigs before sale at the market. He described how his parents tied the hog to one end of a seesaw and added the corresponding number of bricks to the other side until the scale was level. Dewey criticized that standardizing assessments in education used similarly crude an inexact measures. We contend (Dewey argued), that after a prescribed and arbitrary amount of time by one standard measure we determine that student Sally knows 72 bricks worth of English and student Monee knows 83 bricks of English but quizzically neither teacher nor student alike have any real sense what one brick of anything is worth.

This was my introduction to Dewey before our deep dive into his education philosophy and contribution American education. I admired his zeal and critique immediately. As someone myself who has been swept up into new movement of individualized education or at the very least, find myself intrigued by the benefits and creativity of differentiated instruction, multi-modal assessment and more active and actual world relevance and connection in school, I needed the likes of Dewey to help me make sense of what I vehemently disagree with our current state of education. It seems that in Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed (1897) he too, was advocating for and inspired by a charge to reform education and reframe it as social and moral imperative for democratic life to thrive.

As Dr. Scheuerman forewarned us, many passages of Dewey’s prose are verbose and complex. So many paragraph-long sentences, even this short piece, demanded a re-read. Yet, there are also streaks and bursts of cogent insight and statements of purpose that undoubtedly guide educators still these 120 years hence. For example, his idea about simultaneous psychological and sociological forces acting on each individual student and teacher provide a re-packaging of the nature vs. nurture dialectic and apply in more practical terms. His idea that our psychological education begins from birth and that we are inculcated, unconsciously, with world-shaping notions that are “saturating our consciousness” provides a nice lens to appreciate the individual/social paradigm we each try to make sense of and fit into. Dewey notes that an individual begins compiling and contending with the resources that have shaped social togetherness from their birth and that bestowed unto them is the foundation for each new human to become “an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization.” Wow. These are big statements and ideas that lay the foundation for the transformative potential of education and reinforce the societal onus to provide and uplift compulsory education.

Dewey complemented Tolstoy in that he too believed in the value preparing a student for life right now and not just only education of history or just a speculative education of what might be. He wrote, “To prepare him [a student] for future life means to give him command of himself, it means to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities.” School, Dewey thought, must be a part of the actual, current, and relevant life experience of the child and if not, such things were not educative. School cannot nor should not happen in a vacuum. It should be, Dewey thought, a delicate balance of the social space and the togetherness of society ignited by the passion, intrigue and spark of the individual. Beautiful.

Dewey’s ideas about the psychological and sociological educative realms offer values about the social purposes of education that appeal to my sense of vocation as a teacher and pride I have in pubic education. I appreciated that Dewey contends that “school is primarily a social institution…and education a social process” and that if school lives up to it’s potential and philosophy that such a positive experience can help an individual student to “share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.” These are lofty and noble ideals of individual potential as well as a reminder of the democratic and civic potential and responsibilities inherent in public education.

Lastly, Dewey’s remarks about the practical application and relevance of education can be so useful to educators today as we try to successfully recoil and redefine our own relevance and purpose as we emerge from the NCLB era. Dewey advocates for vocational education and training in the skills of cooking, sewing and manual training as activities of the home and believes school can provide the obvious extension of such skill training. Moreover, Dewey’s conviction about the social, political and moral power and import of public schools serves as a charge to our shared commitment and validates the experiment of compulsory and public education. He wrote, “it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.”