Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world…
-John Dewey, Experience and Education
John Dewey The final philosopher, which is considered to be the greatest asset to pragmatism, has been described as the greatest as American philosophy, Dewey move from the idealist’s camp to the beginnings of a pragmatic philosophy which he was to characterize with the name of instrumentalism .
John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic and political activist, was born on October 20, 1859, to Archibald Dewey and Lucina Artemisia Rich in Burlington, Vermont. Dewey’s mother, the daughter of a wealthy farmer, was a devout Calvinist. His father,was a merchant.
Growing up, John Dewey attended Burlington public schools, excelling as a student. When he was just 15 years old, he enrolled at the University of Vermont, where he particularly enjoyed studying philosophy under the tutelage of H.A.P. Torrey. Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879, and received his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in 1884.
The autumn after Dewey graduated, his cousin landed him a teaching job at a seminary in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Two years later, Dewey lost the position when his cousin resigned as principal of the seminary.
After being laid off, Dewey went back to Vermont and started teaching at a private school in Vermont. During his free time, he read philosophical treatises and discussed them with his former teacher, Torrey. As his fascination with the topic grew, Dewey decided to take a break from teaching in order to study philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins. George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall were among the teachers there who influenced Dewey most. Upon receiving his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1884. At Michigan he met Harriet Alice Chipman, and the two married in 1886. Over the course of their marriage, they would give birth to six children and adopt one child.
Dewey was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, teaching there from1884 to 1888 and 1889-1894, with a one year term at the University of Minnesota in 1888. In 1894 he became the chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. In 1899, John Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. Dewey taught at Columbia University from 1905 until he retired in 1929, and occasionally taught as professor emeritus until 1939.
In 1888 Dewey and his family left Michigan for the University of Minnesota, where he was a professor of philosophy. However, within a year, they chose to return to the University of Michigan, where Dewey taught for the next five years.
By 1894 Dewey was made head of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago. He remained at the University of Chicago until 1904, also serving as director of its School of Education for two years.
Dewey left Chicago in 1904 to join the Ivy League, becoming a professor of philosophy at Columbia University while working at Teachers College on the side.
In 1930, Dewey left Columbia and retired from his teaching career with the title of professor emeritus. His wife, Harriet, had died three years earlier.
During his years at Columbia he traveled the world as a philosopher, social and political theorist, and educational consultant. Among his major journeys are his lectures in Japan and China from 1919 to 1921, his visit to Turkey in 1924 to recommend educational policy, and a tour of schools in the USSR in 1928. Of course, Dewey never ignored American social issues.
He was outspoken on education, domestic and international politics, and numerous social movements. Among the many concerns that attracted Dewey’s support were women’s suffrage, progressive education, educator’s rights, the Humanistic movement, and world peace.
John Dewey was a strong proponent for progressive educational reform. He believed that education should be based on the principle of learning through doing.
In 1894 Dewey and his wife Harriet started their own experimental primary school, the University Elementary School, at the University of Chicago. His goal was to test his educational theories, but Dewey resigned when the university president fired Harriet.
In 1919, John Dewey, along with his colleagues Charles Beard, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson and Wesley Clair Mitchell, founded The New School for Social Research. The New School is a progressive, experimental school that emphasizes the free exchange of intellectual ideas in the arts and social sciences.
During the 1920s, Dewey lectured on educational reform at schools all over the world. He was particularly impressed by experiments in the Russian educational system and shared what he learned with his colleagues when he returned to the States: that education should focus mainly on students’ interactions with the present. Dewey did not, however, dismiss the value of also learning about the past.
In the 1930s, after he retired from teaching, Dewey became an active member of numerous educational organizations, including the New York Teachers Guild and the International League for Academic Freedom.
In later years there were many “disciples” of John Dewey who in trying to elaborate some of his ideas went to extremes that appalled their mentor Dewey was a frequent critic of what came to be known in American educational circles as “progressivism” or the “progressive movement”.
In 1946, Dewey, then 87, remarried to a widow named Roberta Grant. Following their marriage, the Deweys lived off of Roberta’s inheritance and John’s book royalties. On June 1, 1952, John Dewey, a lifelong supporter of educational reform and defender of rights for everyman, died of pneumonia at the age of 92 in the couple’s New York City apartment.
Academic Contribution
Dewey wrote his first two books, Psychology (1887) and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), when he was working at the University of Michigan. Over the course of his lifetime, Dewey published more than 1,000 works, including essays, articles and books. His writing covered a broad range of topics: psychology, philosophy, educational theory, culture, religion and politics. Through his articles in The New Republic, he established himself as one of the most highly regarded social commentators of his day. Dewey continued to write prolifically up until his death.
Philosophical Basis
Dewey’s philosophy, known as experimentalism, or instrumentalism, largely centered on human experience. Rejecting the more rigid ideas of Transcendentalism to which Dewey had been exposed in academia, it viewed ideas as tools for experimenting, with the goal of improving the human experience.
Philosophy was not, for Dewey, a game played with intellectual abstractions and theoretical constructs; rather it was part of the ongoing life of individuals and the society. Philosophy was, as far as he was concerned, a part of culture and the way we philosophized, as well as the things about which we philosophized, was determined in large part by this culture
Concept of Truth
Truth in the Dewey epistemology can be viewed as the production of desired consequences But this does not give truth any special existential status, it simply means that in a particular case something is true.Truth may, therefore, exist in varying degrees. Truth is contingent on, or relative to, set or circumstances. Knowing is an open-ended, on going, human activity. As such it is constantly subject to error.
There are three major points of significance. First, it is an open-ended, activity, open, to the public and in fact, dependent upon the public test rather than some private metaphysical test. Second, it is subject to error and is continuously being revised in terms of new conditions and new consequences. And, third, it places the ultimate responsibility for truth and knowledge directly upon the shoulders of man.
Truth is for him, is evolution based, not a completely given, ready-made, fixed system. The sole verifiable and fruitful object of know edge is the particular set of changes that generate the object of study, together with the consequences that flow from them.
When the ideas, views, conceptions, hypotheses, beliefs, which we frame succeed, secure harmony, adjustment, we call them true. Successful ideas are true. When I say the idea works, it is the same as saying it is true. Successful working is the essential characteristic of a true idea. The success of the idea is not the cause nor the evidence of its truth, but is its truth : the successful idea is a true idea.
Finally, and most important, the Dewey does not view reality as an abstract “thing”. Rather, it is a process of transaction which involves both doing and undergoing, the two characteristics of experience. For experience is a two way street: first is the doing and second is the process of deriving meaning from the act and its results. Experience demands both dimensions, for the second cannot exist without the first. And the first has no meaning without the second.
Aesthetics
Art as Experience (1934) is Dewey’s major writing on aesthetics.
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire. Dewey’s pragmatist’s standards of art and beauty do not exist in some separate realm. What is beautiful is simply what we find beautiful in our own experience, what has the power to move us and to make us feel deeply. Art is a form in which an artist describes his own personal experience to the viewer. There is no legitimacy to the conceit cherished by some art enthusiasts that aesthetic enjoyment is the privileged endowment of the few.
The senses play a key role in artistic creation and aesthetic appreciationThe unifying element in this process is emotion–not the emotion of raw passion and outburst, but emotion that is reflected upon and used as a guide to the overall character of the artwork
Art is a product of culture, and it is through art that the people of a given culture express the significance of their lives, as well as their hopes and ideals. Because art has its roots in the consummation values experienced in the course of human life, its values have an affinity to commonplace values.
The test of a work of art is whether or not it can stir the viewer and communicate to him the experience with all. Thus, the public test of a work of art is whether or not the artist has communicated his experience to us and whether others share the sense of pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction we receive from a work of art.
Concept of Good (Ethics)
Dewey, throughout his ethical writings, stressed the need for an open-ended, flexible, and experimental approach to problems of practice aimed at the determination of the conditions for the attainment of human goods and a critical examination of the consequences of means adopted to promote them.
The central focus of Dewey’s criticism of the tradition of ethical thought is its tendency to seek solutions to moral and social problems in dogmatic principles and simplistic criteria which in his view were incapable of dealing effectively with the changing requirements of human events. Ideals and values must be evaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or as valuable instruments for social progress.
In large part, then, Dewey’s ideas in ethics were programmatic rather than substantive, defining the direction that he believed human thought and action must take in order to identify the conditions that promote the human good in its fullest sense, rather than specifying particular formulae or principles for individual and social action.
Man derives his values from the society and since these values help determine much of what his life will be, society and its relationship to the individual may be one of the most important concerns for Dewey. Society is a basic concept for Dewey since all actions must be considered in the light of their social designed to pass along the cultural heritage from one generation to the next, must be concerned with society and with its students as members of society.
Dewey believes that the good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.Dewey finds growth the basis of all ethics. That which contributes to growth is good. That which would stunt, deflect, or retard it is bad. But, since man is not completely independent unto himself, what may appear good in the private sense must also be explored in the public sense. According to Dewey only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part.
Ethical values are a product of the transactional functioning of man and society. The good is that which resolves indeterminate situations in the best way possible. Thus, the use of the intellect in the solving of problems is considered good by the Dewey while total avoidance of human problems or unthinking reliance on some “higher” authority would be considered bad.. In each generation must create new values and new solutions to deal with new problems. The values of the crossbow, the pragmatists would say, are no longer necessarily applicable or relevant to the day of the hydrogen bomb.
Dewey finds growth the basis of all ethics. That which contributes to growth is good. That which would stunt, deflect, or retard it is bad. But, since man is not completely independent unto himself, what may appear good in the private sense must also be explored in the public sense.
The major concern, then, of Dewey ethical theory is the public test, the test that is open to the public and which can be reiterated or verified by others. Dewey’s theory of inquiry cannot be fully understood either in the meaning of its central tenets or the significance of its originality without considering how it applies to social aims and values, the central concern of his ethical and social theory.
Concept of Universe
Dewey begins with the observation that the universe as we experience it both individually and collectively is an admixture of the precarious, the transitory and contingent aspect of things, and the stable, the patterned regularity of natural processes that allows for prediction and human intervention. The, universe rather than being comprised of things or, in more traditional terms, substances, is comprised of happenings or occurrences that admit of both episodic uniqueness and general, structured order.
He protests against setting up a universe, in analogy with the cognitive side of human nature, as a system of fixed elements in fixed relations, be they mechanical, sensational, or conceptual, and making all the other phases of man’s nature beliefs, aversions, affections mere epiphenomena, appearances, subjective impressions or facts in consciousness; against relegating concrete selves, specific feeling and willing beings with the beliefs in which they declare themselves, to the phenomenal. The universe s in the making and will always be in the making, we shape it to our ends; and in this process the thinking and belief of conscious personal beings play an active part.
Dewey on Place of Women
Dewey believed that a woman’s place in society was determined by her environment and not just her biology. On women he says, “You think too much of women in terms of sex. Think of them as human individuals for a while, dropping out the sex qualification, and you won’t be so sure of some of your generalizations about what they should and shouldn’t do.
Dewey on Education;
Dewey philosophy and its educational implications are inextricably interwoven. Dewey regarded philosophy as a general theory of education and or this reason placed a great deal of emphasis on epidemiological and axiological considerations. Education is seen as basically a social process rooted in problem-solving and the exploration of the meaning of experience.
Dewey on Educational Aims
The aim of education The aim of education according to pragmatism is dynamic in nature . According to John Dewey education is not social heritage of the past, but the good life in the present and in the future.. The aim for education is to teach children to be comfortable in their learning environment to an extent that children are living their life. Dewey believed in this type of environment that is not considered a preparation for life, but life. He believed that educators should know the things that motivate and interest children and plan accordingly. Dewey believed that aims should grow out of existing conditions, be tentative, and have an end view.
In Democracy and education, he wrote that education is “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” To have an aim is to act with meaning. The aim that might be derived from the foregoing definition of education would include the helping of the child to develop in such a way as to contribute to his continued growth.
While Dewey disliked the use of the term aims in its usual sense because it implied an end and Dewey saw on final and permanent end to education, he did set down three characteristics of good educational aims. :
1. An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activates and needs (including original instinct and acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated …… it is one thing to use adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activates of those educated.
2. An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperation with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberated and to organize their capacities…. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demands for adaptation to external aims.
3. Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific is , of course, general in its ramified connection of possible future achievements, the less his present activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives. If one knew enough, one could star almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and fruitfully.
Thus, it would seem safe to say that for Dewey the one “aim” in education is to provide the conditions that make growth possible.
Dewey on Role of Teacher
Dewey believed that the successful classroom teacher possesses a passion for knowledge and an intellectual curiosity in the materials and methods they teach. For Dewey, this propensity is an inherent curiosity and love for learning that differs from one’s ability to acquire, recite and reproduce textbook knowledge. “No one,” according to Dewey, “can be really successful in performing the duties and meeting these demands [of teaching] who does not retain [her] intellectual curiosity intact throughout [her] entire career” According to Dewey, it is not that the “teacher ought to strive to be a high-class scholar in all the subjects he or she has to teach,” rather, “a teacher ought to have an unusual love and aptitude in some one subject: history, mathematics, literature, science, a fine art, or whatever”. The classroom teacher does not have to be a scholar in all subjects; rather, a genuine love in one will elicit a feel for genuine information and insight in all subjects taught.
In addition to this propensity for study into the subjects taught, the classroom teacher “is possessed by a recognition of the responsibility for the constant study of school room work, the constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils”. For Dewey, this desire for the lifelong pursuit of learning is inherent in other professions , and has particular importance for the field of teaching. As Dewey notes, “this further study is not a side line but something which fits directly into the demands and opportunities of the vocation”
According to Dewey, this propensity and passion for intellectual growth in the profession must be accompanied by a natural desire to communicate one’s knowledge with others. “There are scholars who have [the knowledge] in a marked degree but who lack enthusiasm for imparting it. To the ‘natural born’ teacher learning is incomplete unless it is shared” (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35). For Dewey, it is not enough for the classroom teacher to be a lifelong learner of the techniques and subject-matter of education; she must aspire to share what she knows with others in her learning community.
The best indicator of teacher quality, according to Dewey, is the ability to watch and respond to the movement of the mind with keen awareness of the signs and quality of the responses her students exhibit with regard to the subject-matter presented .As Dewey notes, “I have often been asked how it was that some teachers who have never studied the art of teaching are still extraordinarily good teachers. The explanation is simple. They have a quick, sure and unflagging sympathy with the operations and process of the minds they are in contact with. Such a teacher is has the intellectual fortitude to identify the successes and failures of this process, as well as how to appropriately reproduce or correct it in the future.
Dewey holds the profession of teaching in high esteem, often equating its social value to that of the ministry and to parenting .Perhaps the most important attributes, according to Dewey, are those personal inherent qualities which the teacher brings to the classroom. As Dewey notes, “no amount of learning or even of acquired pedagogical skill makes up for the deficiency” of the personal traits needed to be most successful in the profession.
According to Dewey, the successful classroom teacher occupies an indispensable passion for promoting the intellectual growth of young children. In addition, she knows that her career, in comparison to other professions, entails stressful situations, long hours and limited financial reward; all of which have the potential to overcome her genuine love and sympathy for her students. For Dewey, “One of the most depressing phases of the vocation is the number of care worn teachers one sees, with anxiety depicted on the lines of their faces, reflected in their strained high pitched voices and sharp manners. While contact with the young is a privilege for some temperaments, it is a tax on others, and a tax which they do not bear up under very well. And in some schools, there are too many pupils to a teacher, too many subjects to teach, and adjustments to pupils are made in a mechanical rather than a human way. Human nature reacts against such unnatural conditions”
It is essential, according to Dewey, that the classroom teacher has the mental propensity to overcome the demands and stressors placed on her because the students can sense when their teacher is not genuinely invested in promoting their learning
Dewey on Curriculum Framework
Dewey believe in a broad and diversified curriculum. Emphasis is on practical and utilitarian subjects. Based on the principle of utility, integration and child’s natural interests and experience
Dewey endorse a more general education as opposed to narrow specialization. Pragmatic curriculum is composed of both process and content. The traditional arrangement of subject matter are seen as an arbitrary and wasteful system to which all learners have been forced to conform.
Dewey opines that all learning should be particular and contextual to a given time, place and circumstances. For example, history is traditionally taught to the student without considering its relevance to the everyday experience. So what is the use of studying history? Whatever may be the subject matter it should liberate and enrich personal life by furnishing context, background and outlook
Dewey in his book “Democracy and Education” recommended three levels of curricular organization:
(1) making and doing;
(2) history and geography; and
(3) organized sciences.
At the first curricular level, making and doing, should engage students in activities and projects based on their experiences. In the second level curriculum ,History and Geography, which Dewey regards as two great educational resources, help in enlarging the scope and significance of the child’s temporal and spatial experience from the immediate home and school environments to that of the larger community and the world. Dewey’s third stage of curriculum is that of the organized subjects, the various sciences, consisting of bodies of tested knowledge
He therefore urged that manual training, science, nature-study, art and similar subjects be given precedence over reading, writing and arithmetic (the traditional three R’s) in the primary curriculum. The problems raised by the exercise of the child’s motor powers in constructive work would lead naturally, he said, into learning the more abstract, intellectual branches of knowledge.
Dewey on Instructional Methodology
Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that process.
Dewey had specific notions regarding how education should take place within the classroom. In The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Dewey discusses two major conflicting schools of thought regarding educational pedagogy.
The first is centered on the curriculum and focuses almost solely on the subject matter to be taught. Dewey argues that the major flaw in this methodology is the inactivity of the student; within this particular framework, “the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened” He argues that in order for education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows the student to relate the information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection with this new knowledge. Children soak up knowledge and retain it for use when they are spontaneously induced to look into matters of compelling interest to themselves. They progress fastest in learning, not through being mechanically drilled in prefabricated material, but by doing work, experimenting with things, changing them in purposive ways.
It is through this reasoning that Dewey became one of the most famous proponents of hands-on learning or experiential education, which is related to, but not synonymous with experiential learning.
The child learns best through direct personal experience. In the primary stage of education these experiences should revolve around games and occupations analogous to the activities through which mankind satisfies its basic material needs for food, clothing, shelter and protection.
In this second school of thought, “we must take our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and quantity of learning” . According to Dewey, the potential flaw in this line of thinking is that it minimizes the importance of the content as well as the role of the teacher.
The school has to give children, not only an insight into the social importance of such activities, but above all the opportunities to practice them in play form. This leads naturally into the problem or “project method” which has come to be identified with the essence of the progressive procedure.
Participation in meaningful projects, learning by doing, encouraging problems and solving them, not only facilitates the acquisition and retention of knowledge but fosters the right character traits: unselfishness, helpfulness, critical intelligence, individual initiative, etc.
Occasionally children need to be alone and on their own. But in the main they will learn more by doing things together. By choosing what their group would like to do, planning their work, helping one another do it, trying out various ways and means of performing the tasks, involved and discovering what will forward the project, comparing and appraising the results, the youngsters would best develop their latent powers, their skill, understanding, self-reliance and cooperative habits.
Dewey on Discipline
Dewey’s theories blended attention to the child as an individual with rights and claims of his own with a recognition of the gulf between an outdated and class-distorted educational setup inherited from the past and the urgent requirements of the new era.
Children cannot formulate their grievances collectively, or conduct organized struggle for improvements in their conditions of life and mode of education. Apart from individual explosions of protest, they must be helped by spokesmen among adults who are sensitive to the troubles of the young and are resolved to do something about remedying them.
Dewey do not believe in external discipline enforced by the superior authority of the teacher. It supplements discipline with greater freedom of activity. He feel that discipline which is based on the principles of child’s activities and need is beneficial. He want that the interest of the child should be aroused, sustained and satisfied.
Dewey believe that the learner’s freedom is not anarchy or allowing the child to do anything without considering the consequences. Rather they believe in the purposeful co-operative activities carried on in a free and happy environment control comes from the cooperative context of shared activity.
The Progressive Education Association, inspired by Dewey’s ideas, summarise his doctrines as follows:
1. The conduct of the pupils shall be governed by themselves, according to the social needs of the community.
2. Interest shall be the motive for all work.
3. Teachers will inspire a desire for knowledge, and will serve as guides in the investigations undertaken, rather than as task-masters.
4. Scientific study of each pupil’s development, physical, mental, social and spiritual, is absolutely essential to the intelligent direction of his development.
5. Greater attention is paid to the child’s physical needs, with greater use of the out-of-doors.
6. Cooperation between school and home will fill all needs of the child’s development such as music, dancing, play and other extra-curricular activities.
7. All progressive schools will look upon their work as of the laboratory type, giving freely to the sum of educational knowledge the results of their experiments in child culture.. With his instrumentalist theory of knowledge as a guide, Dewey tried out and confirmed his new educational procedures there with children between the ages of four and fourteen.
Dewey’s ideas have inspired many modifications in the traditional curriculum, in the techniques of instruction, in the pattern of school construction.