yes! John Dewey in 1897 = rock star. I like how comprehensive and integrated his idea of education is. When you think about it, how can you separate education from just...the fact of being alive? I came across Dewey in researching Watauga College a couple of years ago, and it's interesting to see how his influence has played out over the last century. The existence of programs like Watauga--2 year, interdisciplinary, residential learning communities of freshmen and sophomores--are usually credited to Dewey and the kinds of ideas he lays out for us here. This is not altogether true, though...Dewey's contemporary and counterpart, a guy named Alexander Meiklejohn, was more directly responsible for these "experimental" colleges. Interesting dynamic between these guys...despite sharing many ideas about the role and purpose of education in society, they were frequently--and publicly--at odds over fundamental political and philosophical issues. Not the least of these was Dewey's behaviorism (evident in all of the phrases Dewey uses here to refer to the careful control and structuring of the child's environment) against the value Meiklejohn placed on a person's ability to think, decide, act rationally and morally, etc.
....Strange, both saw education as integral to democracy, but they disagreed over the best way to get to a democratic society through education. It's almost as if, for Dewey, "education" truly IS the experience of school itself, as a systematic and controlled development of certain behaviors; whereas "education" for Meiklejohn is cultivating the individual's critical/mental skills. Both wanted education to foster a sense of social responsibility/participation in people, but Dewey thought the key was in conditioning behaviors and Meiklejohn thought it was in developing the ability to think. Classic divide.
Interesting supplement to this essay--> Dewey's behaviorist approach was extraordinarily attractive to early 20th century American capitalists, such as Rockefeller, who were quite keen on the idea that schools could be intentionally organized to condition people in ways that would be favorable to their purposes, which included insuring access to a large body of potential workers. John Taylor Gatto recently published a very cool but depressing book called, "The Underground History of American Education," where he lays out the path by which American businessowners, allied with a veritable army of behavioral psychologists--including Dewey--organized in the 1920's-30s to help produce what we now recognize as compulsory institutional education, which was aimed from the beginning at the production of a large, docile class of workers whose "education" was to consist primarily in behavioral conditioning. School would produce complacent, obedient individuals who would already be accustomed to organizing their lives around things like timetables and who would excel at repetitive tasks, and thus the transition from school to work would appear entirely natural--essentially, Gatto argues that school was made in the image of work, that the actual
content of education was/is worker-preparation (not the cultivation of the mind or the development of "critical thinking" skills, values, character, etc.), and that the whole thing was meant to serve the expansion of American capitalist enterprises. In a way, John Dewey unwittingly sold the American population out to the economic interests of a few wealthy people and their corporations. Ouch.
"What's Wrong With Teachers," "Why Johnny Can't Disobey," "The Classroom..."--all of the criticisms we've encountered, by this account, seem justified, all of the bad things about school are true! ...and John Dewey helped make it happen ;[ If he were around today, I don't think he'd approve of what's happened as a result of how well his ideas have worked. It's eerie to read the "Pedagogic Creed" now and see how these ideas, which are so inspiring and seem dead-on at times, had within them the seeds of exactly the kind of educational experience we see so many people fighting against today.
This sheds quite a different light on his comment about education being a "process." We'd like to think, idealistically, that this process is one of curiosity, investigation, critique, and that "education is a process" has something to do with developing a love of learning itself and learning
how to learn. That's what I usually think of, anyway. The process of "education" that Dewey's ideas may have actually produced in our schools, on the other hand, is the process by which children are subjected to a calculated system of psychological conditioning and control. The implication is that this is what it really means to say that someone is "educated" in our society...just like the observation on another thread that it is only after we become educated that we seem unable to tell when obedience or adherence to the "norm" has gone too far....education is the process by which obedient populations are produced and controlled?...
Here's the link to Gatto's website, where you can actually read most of the chapters from his book. If you're interested, the stuff on Dewey can be found in chapter 13, starting with the section called "The New Thought Tide"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/index.htm
Sorry for the long post, I got carried away ;x One last thing--in light of Gatto's depiction of how John Dewey's ideas were used to structure schooling in a way that would be favorable to the production of workers, check out this paragraph from the "Pedagogic Creed" and see what you think:
"In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted--we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents--into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service."