Education, history of philosophy of

9. John Dewey

John Dewey is regarded with justice as the pre-eminent philosopher of education of the twentieth century. Like Marx and Nietzsche, he understood the function of philosophy to be social and cultural reconstruction, and like Marx he aspired to reconstruct philosophy itself by bringing science into it. But he rejected the teleological conceptions of history embraced by Marx, Hegel and Kant in favour of a kind of evolutionary naturalism. He took this naturalism to preclude the existence of absolute norms of conduct, and to warrant recognition of a plurality of goods and moral criteria. If there is any ‘end’ entailed by human nature it is growth itself, he argued and, following Rousseau, he held that a good society is one in which growth is maximized, harmonized with that of others, and reconciled with the collective work of citizenship. He argued, much as Rousseau did, that democracy is the one form of political life in which the convergence of these goals is possible, and he adopted and developed John Stuart Mill’s idea that social progress is possible through the freedom of individuals to engage in social experimentation, or the application of the methods of science to the problems of social existence (see Mill, J.S.). Dewey insists that this experimentation or application of ‘social intelligence’ must be cooperative, governed by the norms of respectful communication, and guided by the plurality of goods and criteria valued by those whose interests are at stake. He thought that in this way the Enlightenment promise of social progress through the application of scientific method might be achieved simultaneously with enacting democracy as ‘a way of life’ in which human growth and quality of experience can be optimized.

Experience became for Dewey both the goal and means of education: the richness of future experience its goal, and present experiences which engage the student’s activity and improve the prospect of desirable experiences in the future its means. His methodological Hegelianism, or strategy of undercutting the dualisms dividing one school of opinion against another, is as evident in his philosophy of education as elsewhere. He resisted the duality of thought and action, book learning and vocationalism, pedagogy driven by a preconceived curriculum and pedagogy driven by the antecedent interests of the child. Above all, he held that the social world of the school and of a properly democratic society must coincide, and that the exercise of intelligence and engagement in adaptive conduct are inseparable. Classrooms must therefore be devoted to the collaborative activity of inquiry, he concluded (see Dewey, J.).