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JOHN DEWEYRoleNameAffiliationProf. Sujata PatelDepartmentNational CoordinatorSubject CoordinatorofSociology,University of HyderabadPaper coordinatorProf. R. IndiraFormerly Professor of Sociology,University of MysoreContent WriterDr. Perpetua MirandaHead, Department of Sociology,SophiaCollegeforWomen,MumbaiLanguage ReviewerProf. R. IndiraFormerly Professor of Sociology,University of MysoreTechnical ConversionModule StructureIntroduction, Life Sketch, Education Paradigm,Dewey’s Pedagogy and Concluding NotesJOHN DEWEYDescription of the ModuleItemsDescription of the moduleSubject NameSociologyPaper NameEducation and SocietyModule Name/TitleJohn DeweyModule Id9hPre RequisitesDemocracy and education and learning throughexperimentsThis module introduces us to the educational thoughtsof John Dewey known as the founder of theObjectivesKey wordsPhilosophical School of Pragmatism.Philosophical School of pragmatism, Experiential learningand Democratic education system1
JOHN DEWEYIntroductionJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, educator and the founder of the Philosophical School ofPragmatism. He was a social critic who was a pioneer in functional psychology and a leader of theprogressive movement in education in the United States. He is one of the most influential thinkers ofmodern educational theory. His ideas were very revolutionary in his life time and have had a greatinfluence on modern pedagogy.Life SketchJohn Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermonton in USA on the 20th of October, 1859. He was the son ofa grocer. He was a shy boy who loved reading and was not a very brilliant student. He attended the PublicSchool of Burlington and later entered the University of Vermont in 1875. He graduated in 1879 andtaught in a high school for three years. In 1882 he attended the John Hopkins University for advancedstudies in philosophy. He came under the influence of George Morris a Neo Hegelian whose thoughtsattracted the attention of Dewey. In 1884 he was awarded the Ph.D degree from the John HopkinsUniversity. For a year, i.e. between 1888 and 1889 he was professor of philosophy at the University ofMinnesota.He then went to be an instructor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan.He spent ten years there and was very involved in studying Hegel and the British Neo Hegelians.Dewey started to get interested in education while he was in Michigan. He observed through his readingthat most schools were following early traditions and did not pay any attention to the latest findings inpsychology and to the need for integrating democracy in the current social order. Dewey was searchingfor a new way, in fact a philosophy of education that would be addressing these needs. In 1894 Deweyleft Michigan and became a professor of philosophy and chairman of the Department of Philosophy,Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Dewey became famous here. He gave up theHegelian theory of ideas and instead took on the instrumentalist theory of knowledge, which conceived ofideas as tools to solve problems encountered in the environment. Dewy believed that man is a product ofnature and finds meaning and goals in life here and now. He felt that nature as encountered in ordinaryexperiences is the ultimate reality.Dewey’s philosophy was labeled pragmatism. Pragmatists believe that reality is to beexperienced. He was most famous for what is called ‘progressive education’ which is a view thatemphasises the need to ‘learn by doing’. He believed that one learnt well with a hands-on-approach. Hewanted students to interact with their environment so that they could adapt and learn. Dewey wanted2
students and teachers to learn together. He wanted all the stakeholders to have an equal voice in thelearning experience. He helped found the famous laboratory school known as the Dewey School where hetested his psychological and pedagogic hypotheses. His important books are The School and Society(Chicago, 1900) and The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago, 1902). He left Chicago in 1904 forColumbia. At this point in time he had become very famous for his philosophical ideas and educationaltheories. He remained at Columbia till his retirement in 1930 and gained international prominence. It wasthrough the Columbia Teachers College that Dewey’s educational philosophy spread throughout theworld. This institution was a training center for teachers of many countries. Dewey exerted a lot ofinfluence on all whom he lectured to. The years 1919 to 1921 saw him lecturing at Tokyo, Peking andNanking. He conducted educational surveys of Turkey, Mexico and Russia. He remained active even afterhis retirement and kept writing till his death.Educational ParadigmDewey showed great interest in social and political issues and also in technical and philosophical studies.He influenced people in all fields. He was very good at expressing his deep hopes and aspirations andpossessed great imagination and wit. Dewey saw democracy as an approach that provided greatopportunities for personal growth and experimentation .The ideal society for him was one that createdconditions for constantly enlarging the experience of all its members.Dewey preferred the scientific method of investigation. For him experimental methods of modernscience were the best ways of approaching scientific problems. He rejected fixed ideas as they stifled thepromise of new scientific methods. Dewey’s work in philosophy and psychology were contained in hismajor interests in educational reform. He relied on the psychological tests applied to children. He sawthought and learning as a way of inquiry from doubt to solution to relieve tension. The key concept inDewey’s philosophy was experience. He thought of experience as a single, dynamic, unified whole inwhich everything is ultimately interrelated.Man is primarily a being who acts, suffers and enjoys. The unit of life has a temporal dimensionand a spatial dimension and can undergo internal change and reconstruction. Most of his life consists ofexperiences which are not primarily reflective. There is more to experience than what idealists tell us. Hewas of the view that individual experience is the primary unit of life. Experience is all inclusive in thesense that human beings are involved in continuous transactions with the whole of nature, and throughsystematic enquiry they can come to understand the essential characteristics of nature. An experience or asituation is a whole in virtue of its immediate pervasive qualities, and each occurrence of these qualities isunique.The specific areas of Dewey’s philosophy can be investigated against the view of experience andnature. He saw education as an experience which has the aim of growth and the achievement of maturity.The educational process must build up the interest of the child and the child must experience thinking anddoing in the classroom with the teacher as a guide rather than a taskmaster forcing the child to engage inrote learning only. This would definitely lead to the growth of the child in all aspects and in all itspotential. Dewey started the process of opening Laboratory Schools in 1896 and the University ofChicago was noted for its most progressive educational thoughts. Dewey was the head of the institutiontill 1904.Dewey’s PedagogyDewey’s ideas affected both American educational theory and practice. His ideas were student centric orchild centric and not subject oriented. He placed the emphasis of learning on the needs and interests of thechild. Children, he believed should be allowed to explore their environment. He advocated educationthrough activity and was not an advocate of the formal ways of learning. Dewey’s preference was forexperimental learning and not for traditional subjects.3
Dewey was of the view that knowing and inquiring are like an ‘art’ and require activeexperimentation, manifestation and testing. He developed a new theory of inquiry or experimental logic.When we find ourselves in a difficult situation, we develop the spirit of inquiry because the problem athand has to be solved. We articulate the problem and then hypothesise on the solution to the problem. Theknowledge that we get acquire in a specific inquiry becomes a part of our experience and serves as thebackground for further inquiry. By studying the types of enquiry that have been successful we canformulate rules and norms for directing future inquiries. Democracy according to Dewey gives space forinquirers which are bold, courageous and open minded. We must constantly submit knowledge to the testof the community so that we clarify, refine and justify this knowledge. All life is and can be artistic.Dewey gave a prominent place to aesthetic quality and said that aesthetic quality is an essentialcharacteristic of all experiences. It can be funded with new meanings, ideas and emotions.Dewey viewed human life as a movement qualified by experiences. Experience includes integrityand funded aesthetic quality, which Dewey termed as consummation. He was interested in the methodsthat could be applied to resolve conflict situations and advocated social reform so that all men could havea life of enriched meaning. He believed in an inter-disciplinary curriculum which focused on connectingmultiple subjects where the students would go freely in and out of classrooms and construct their ownpaths for acquiring knowledge. The teacher would be a facilitator, observing the students’ interest andwould help develop problem solving skills. In a traditional class the teacher would instruct pupils, conveyall the information and then take a written test. In Dewey’s method the teacher would give somebackground information and then the students would work in groups to explore concepts within thecontent. There would be a lot of conversation and collaboration. There would be projects, presentations,tests and evaluation.Dewey is best known for his philosophy of education. He was very critical of the rigid and formalways in which students were taught in America during the latter part of the 19thcentury. This methodregarded the child as a passive person on whom information was dumped .The other extreme of allowingthe child to choose what he wanted to study overlooked the fact that the child may be immature. Deweyhowever, was of the view that the child should move from immature experience to an experience whichwas based on skills and intelligence. Children by nature explore and are curious. So ‘Learning by Doing’would benefit them considerably. Thus with proper guidance a child would participate in all types ofexperiences and would cultivate creativity and would also be unique. Dewey believed in cultivating aproper environment and in the process the moral character of the child would develop. The child wouldlearn values and at the same time learn to appreciate the importance of objectivity. The child would alsolearn to imagine and have the courage to change his/her mind in the light of experience. Dewey wantedthe school to mirror society and its institutions. He believed in a shared experience for democracy andcommunity building.The School and Society: Being Three Lectures (1899) was John Dewey's first detailed published work oneducation. In the lectures included in this initial publication, Dewey proposes a psychological, social, andpolitical framework for progressive education. He argues that the progressive approach is both aninevitable product of the Industrial Revolution and a natural fit with the psychology of children.Dewey points out how haphazardly the school as an institution had evolved. His view was thatdifferent parts of schools have been oddly put together and poorly assembled through several centuriesand designed to serve different needs and even conflicting social interests. His opinion was that varietiesof specialised institutions were created to support and supplement the ‘official hierarchy of education’.The teachers’ training schools produced teachers depending on the demand that emerged due to theexpansion of public education in the nineteenth century. The trade and technical schools turned outskilled craftsmen needed for industry and construction. In Dewey’s opinion, different components andparts of the educational system emerged. He noted that in spite of the growth of multi leveled educationalinstitutions’ there was no single consistent principle or purpose of organisation that unified them all.4
Dewey’s efforts were in the direction of evolving this principle. He wanted to provide that unifyingpattern by applying the principles and practices of democracy. The three lectures that he presented wereinitially given as a fundraising lecture series in support of the Laboratory School. The lectures proceed ina pattern, the first dealing with the relation of the school to social progress, the second with the relation ofthe school to the psychology of the child, and the third with the organisation of the school inaccomplishing these aims.Dewey’s basic argument was that education should be available to every single child in society andthis was possible in his view only in a democratic setup. To him in the first place, the schools should befreely open and made accessible to all from kindergarten to college. At a second level, in a democraticeducational system children would themselves carry on the educational process, aided and guided by theteacher and in the third phase, children would be trained to cooperate with others by sharing with andcaring for one another. Children trained under these circumstances would evolve as creative, welladjusted citizens who would consider others as their fellow citizens and equals. In Dewey’s words thesewould “make over American society in their own image”. By taking education on these lines he felt thatthe “opposition between the old education and the new conditions of life would be overcome. Theprogressive influences radiating from the schools would stimulate and fortify the building of a democraticorder of free and equal citizens”. Dewey’s idea was to integrate the school with society. He wanted this tohappen by a process where learning happens with the actual problems of life. This he believed could beachieved by application of the “principles and practices of democracy”. The school system would be opento all on a completely free and equal basis without any restrictions or segregation on account of colour,race, creed, national origin, gender or social status. Group activity under self-direction and selfgovernment would make the classroom a miniature republic where equality and consideration for allwould prevailDewey was of the opinion that the new school system would take over the functions of andcompensate for the losses sustained by the crumbling of the old institutions clustered around the farmeconomy, the family, the church and the small town. “The school,” he wrote, “must be made into a socialcenter capable of participating in the daily life of the community . . . and make up in part to the child forthe decay of dogmatic and fixed methods of social discipline and for the loss of reverence and theinfluence of authority.” (George Novak Internet Archive 2005, International Socialist Review, Vol. 21,No. 1, Winter 1960). Children were to get from the public school whatever was missing in their liveselsewhere that was essential for their balanced development as members of a democratic country.Dewey therefore urged that manual training, science, nature-study, art and such other subjects begiven precedence over reading, writing and arithmetic in the primary curriculum. The problems raised bythe exercise of the child’s motor powers in constructive work would lead naturally, he said, into learningthe more abstract, intellectual branches of knowledge.5
(Children in Washington D.C. learning how a compass works. An example of the experiential learning ofthe time. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The School and Society. Photo by Frances BenjaminJohnston. (1899).Although Dewey asserted that activities involving the energetic side of the child’s nature shouldtake the first place in primary education, he objected to early specialised training or technical segregationin the public schools which was dictated, not by individual needs or personal preferences of the growingyouth, but by external interests.Dewey, following his co-educator, Francis Parker, rejected the commercial-minded approach toelementary education. They opposed slotting children prematurely into grooves of capitalist manufacture.The business of education is more than education for the sake of business, they declared. They saw in tooearly specialisation the menace of uniformity and the source of a new division into a master and a subjectclass. But this raised some serious issues of contradictions as to what the immigrants, working and middleclasses regarded as education. To them it was not an adornment or a passport to aristocratic culture, butan indispensable equipment to earn a better living and rise in the social scale. They especially valuedthose subjects which were conducive to success in business. During the nineteenth century privatebusiness colleges were set up in the cities to teach mathematics, book keeping, stenography andknowledge of English required for business offices. Mechanics institutes were established to provideskilled manpower for industry.Dewey’s thoughts on education attracted criticism from those who felt that he was beingextremely liberal with students and gave them too much of freedom, which in turn might to teacherslosing control over them. But Dewey believed that an education that was student centric was the best wayof bringing out their potential and it is this approach which assumes enormous significance incontemporary times when most schools continue to be ‘information suppliers’ rather than instilling inchildren a sense of curiosity to explore and experiment.The main tenets of John Dewey’s educational philosophy could be codified thus:·The conduct of the pupils shall be governed by themselves, according to the social needs of thecommunity.·Interest shall be the motive for all work.·Teachers will inspire a desire for knowledge, and will serve as guides in the investigationsundertaken, rather than acting as task-masters.·Scientific study of each pupil’s development, physical, mental, social and spiritual is absolutelyessential for the intelligent direction of his/her development.·Greater attention is paid to the child’s physical needs, with greater use of outdoors.·Cooperation between school and home will fill all needs of the child’s development such asmusic, dancing, play and other extra-curricular activities.·All progressive schools will look upon their work as of the laboratory type and will recognise thevalue of experimentation.These rules for education sum up the theoretical conclusions of the reform movement begun byColonel Francis Parker and carried forward by Dewey at the Laboratory School he set up in 1896 withhis first wife in collaboration with the University of Chicago. With his instrumentalist theory ofknowledge as a guide, Dewey tried out and confirmed his new educational procedures there withchildren between the ages of four and fourteen.6
Dewey’s work was subsequently popularised by the leading faculty members of Teachers College inNew York after Dewey transferred from Chicago to Columbia University. From this fountainheadDewey’s ideas filtered throughout most of the teachers’ training schools and all the grades of publicinstruction below the university level. His disciples organised a John Dewey Society and the ProgressiveEducation Association and have published numerous books and periodicals to propagate and defend hisideologies on learning, schooling, education system and on values like equality and democracy.Concluding NotesJohn Dewey’s ideas had a profound influence on educational practices in the United States. Theprogressive elements in the field of education greatly appreciated his student centric approach. His workon democracy influenced one of his students B.R.Ambedkar who went on to be one of the founders ofmodern India. Dewey is considered the epitome of liberalism by many historians. Some critics howeverfelt that students would fail to acquire basic academic skills in his scheme of things and that the teacherwould become redundant. These views apart, the truth remains that John Dewey continues to remain oneof the most powerful educational philosophers of modern times.References·Dewey John (1902). The Child and the Curriculum, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.·------------- (1913). Interest and Effort in Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.···----------- (1909). Moral Principles in Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.-------------- (1915). Schools of To-Morrow. New York: Dutton.------------- (1934). Education and the Social Order. New York: League for IndustrialDemocracy.·------------ (1937). The Teacher and Society. New York: Appleton-Century.·----------- (1944). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education.New York: Macmillan.------------- (1976). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy ofEducation, New Delhi: Light and Life PublishersDewey John & Evelyn Dewey (1915) Schools of To-Morrow, New York: Dutton, 1915; London:Dent.····Edwards Paul (ed.) (1967). The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: The MacMillianCompany and the Free Press.·Warde W. F. (George Novack) (1960). Transcription/Editing: Daniel Gaido. 2005. HTMLMarkup: David Walters. 2005. Source: International Socialist Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter1960. Public Domain: George Novak Internet Archive 2005.7
JOHN DEWEY Introduction John Dewey was an American philosopher, educator and the founder of the Philosophical School of Pragmatism. He was a social critic who was a pioneer in functional psychology and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United States. He is one of th
