The Future of Western Education

Dewey vs. Dawson: A Spiritual Battle

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that, ‘more than any other American of his time, Dewey expressed the deepest hopes and aspirations of his fellow man’. He has had a greater influence on modern education than perhaps any other thinker.

Dawson, however, ‘one of the principal social thinkers of our age’ (Russell Kirk), is largely unread today. Does any teacher training course reference him? I doubt it. Even Norms and Nobility, perhaps the most famous recent defence of classical education, doesn’t mention him.

What follows is an imaginary discussion on education between Dewey and Dawson, using their own words where possible. I believe it is the heart of the crisis of Western education and Western culture.

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DAWSON: It is an honour to discuss education with you, Mr Dewey. Since I am a traditional Roman Catholic in my views on the matter, I propose that we begin by outlining your views, on which the Dewey School was founded.

DEWEY: Thank you, Mr. Dawson. The honour is mutual. What is education? Education is not, I believe, the communication of knowledge but the sharing of social experience. The child must be integrated into the democratic community, and education is our means of achieving that.

DAWSON: So you believe education is not concerned with intellectual values but exists simply to serve democracy?

DEWEY: Yes, that is correct.

DAWSON: But surely knowledge is indispensable?

DEWEY: True. But it is always secondary to activity, and activity is always secondary to participation.

DAWSON: And you have said it aims at participation in democracy. Do you define ‘democracy’ as a form of government?

DEWEY: A perceptive question. No, democracy in my understanding is a spiritual community based on the participation of every human being in the formation of social values.

DAWSON: These ‘social values’, then, are not transcendent?

DEWEY: That is correct. Morals are essentially social and pragmatic. Any attempt to subordinate education to transcendent values or dogmas must be resisted.

DAWSON: If education forms social values, then, would you agree with the view, held by some today, that education is the great social panacea in the hands of a scientific authority?

DEWEY: No, it is rather a humanitarian religion, aiming at the pastoral ministry of the democratic community.

DAWSON: So every child is a potential member of the democratic church?

DEWEY: Yes, and it is the function of education to actualise his membership and widen his powers of participation. The ultimate end of education is a state of spiritual communion in which the individual, contributing according to his powers, shares in the experience of the whole.

DAWSON: In spite of your secularism, you have a conception of education that is almost purely religious. But is there not a danger that you stand for the socialisation of education to such degree that the schools become an instrument of social conformation - a means for the establishment of the mass mind?

DEWEY: I prefer the term ‘pooled intelligence’.

DAWSON: But don’t primitive peoples achieve this ‘pooled intelligence’ through, for example, initiation rites and ritual dances? These, too, are aimed at social participation and communal experience.

DEWEY: In the sense that integration into the community is the aim of education, yes.

DAWSON: And you have said that there are no transcendent values, so presumably you don’t claim that one community’s set of social values is objectively better than that of another community?

DEWEY: Correct. I do not believe there are transcendent values. The matter is purely pragmatic.

DAWSON: Rousseau, the forefather of education, believed that civilisation was on the whole a mistake and that man would be better off without it. Is that a view you share?

DEWEY: Well, the most that can be said in favour of modern society is that it enables its members to solve new problems with greater practical efficiency. The great aim of life is growth. We become aware of our environment, I believe, only through some temporary strife. Our minds then try to solve the problem, and we examine whether our proposed solution commands the assent of our fellows. If successful, the solution then becomes merely a new state of equilibrium that is an opening for a new state of disequilibrium. The process always matters more than the product.

DAWSON: So knowledge and thought is never a matter of contemplation?

DEWEY: Correct. The process of growth, of improvement and progress rather than the static outcome and result becomes the significant thing. The end is no longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process of transforming the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. Honesty, industry, temperance, justice, like health, wealth and learning, are not goods to be possessed as they would be if they expressed fixed ends to be attained. They are directions of change in the quality of experience. Growth itself is the only moral end.¹

DAWSON: That is a view derived from Peirce. He held that the only thing that makes the human race worth perpetuation is that thereby rational ideas may be developed, and the rationalisation of things furthered. But he added that the community of rational enquirers is in the end a means by which God or the universe itself becomes self-conscious. Human enquirers, he believed, are motivated by a disinterested love of the good for its own sake.

DEWEY: There is no transcendent good. Growth is the only moral end - the swarming of the human animal.

DAWSON: You hold, then, that the worth of a form of social life is to be assessed purely in terms of the extent to which the interests of the group can be shared by all its members and communicated to other groups?

DEWEY: Yes, that is all.

DAWSON: It seems to me that you wish to accept the inheritance of culture, preferring it to savage barbarism, while rejecting the painful process of social and intellectual discipline by which that inheritance has been acquired and transmitted. And if a savage society happened to share group interests equally well, you would have no reason for preferring modern culture anyway.

DEWEY: Education is the acquisition of those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his environment, but it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of control of means for achieving ends. Science and progress allow us better control of means for the end of growth.

DAWSON: I have mentioned that your conception of community seems religious in character. ‘Growth’ and ‘progress’ in particular seem to be almost numinous. But what role do you see for religion?

DEWEY: My supporter Sidney Hook has correctly pointed out that my philosophy is the enemy number one of ‘every doctrine which holds that man should tend to a supernatural end, in function of which he ought to organize his earthly life.’

DAWSON: And that, I presume, is because you regard religion as dangerous if it attempts to create its own community of thought and to separate its adherents from the common mind of the democratic society?

DEWEY: Yes.

DAWSON: And to separate them from the state school which is the organ of that common mind?

DEWEY: Yes.

DAWSON: And so religion is an anti-social force, which every good democrat must reject and condemn?

DEWEY: Yes. The idea of perfecting an ‘inner’ personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others - that which is not capable of free and full communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which one might have internally - and therefore exclusively.²

DAWSON: You believe, then, that the spiritual heritage of the past is unnecessary?

DEWEY: Yes. There is no spiritual dilemma that can’t be solved by science, progress and human problem-solving. We mustn’t get bogged down in a past solution to a past problem. Indeed, the present is what life is in leaving the past behind it. Growth, let me stress, is about adapting oneself to one’s environment and one’s environment to oneself.

DAWSON: And it’s in that sense that you claimed in The Child and the Curriculum, for example, that the subject matter of real science relates to the life experience of the scientist?

DEWEY: Yes. And in fact the great advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. As I explained in The School and Society, all subject matters are selections from the social life of the past and are no more than answers to former social needs.

DAWSON: This sounds like a demand for immediate irrelevance.

DEWEY: It is. Their full meaning in the life of the child is secured only when the studies are presented from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life of society…to become integral parts of the child’s conduct and character they must be assimilated, not as items of information, but as organic parts of his present needs and aims - which in turn are social.³

DAWSON: ‘Organic parts’: like Hegel, then, you believe nature, society and the individual mind are all linked?

DEWEY: Yes, and this has practical consequences for the classroom. I have defined work as a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute and all are engaged in communal projects.⁴

DAWSON: The teacher, too?

DEWEY: The teacher is not an external boss or dictator but the leader of their group activities.⁵ I reject the elitist notion of the teacher as an authority figure. The teacher’s suggestion is a starting point to be developed into a plan through contributions from experience of all engaged in the learning process.⁶

DAWSON: So the idea of a teacher as one who communicates knowledge to those as yet ignorant of it has no place in your model?

DEWEY: Teacher can’t supply solutions ready-made to pupils, and the acquisition of information for the purposes of reproduction in recitation and examination is merely ‘static, cold-storage, miscellaneous junk’.⁷

DAWSON: You believe, then, that every child is in some sense engaged in research?

DEWEY: Indeed. All thinking is research, and all research is original with him who carries it on, even if everyone else in the world already knows what the researcher is looking for.⁸

DAWSON: I see now why you refer so little to other writers in your work. Reading the works of the past, engaging with tradition - that is a kind of group work in which you evidently have little interest.

DEWEY: In the last analysis, all that the educator can do is to modify stimuli.⁹

DAWSON: And why is that?

DEWEY: Because no matter how true what is learned was to those who found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be some about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the individual’s own life.¹⁰

DAWSON: I see now why you believe that if a topic makes an immediate appeal to the pupils, it doesn’t matter what it’s good for. Indeed, on your view, quantitatively, the more experiences are brought into education, the better?

DEWEY: Precisely. Divisions of quality are essentially elitist. Popular music, for example, if it is more relevant to the child’s immediate interests - if it is more relevant to his life - is a better stimulus to the child than so-called classical masterpieces. In selecting educational content, we most concentrate on the things which are socially most fundamental, which have to do with the experiences in which the widest groups share.¹¹

DAWSON: That is consistent with your view that the concept of the teacher as one who communicates knowledge to students ignorant of it is also elitist. For you, then, education is fundamentally about breaking down boundaries, including between subjects, which is why you favour cross-curricula project learning?

DEWEY: Yes - breaking boundaries between subjects, between classes, between nations. In place of a school set apart from life as a place for learning lessons, we have a miniature social group in which study and growth are incidents of present shared experience.¹² Singularity of national or local culture is an offence against humanity. The aim is community building, and all activities - economic, educational, social - must be submitted to collective central planning.

DAWSON: In connection with that, could you explain why you believe that economic history is more human, more democratic and hence more liberalising than political history?

DEWEY: Economic history is more liberating than political history because it deals not with the rise and fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective liberties.¹³  We are interested in the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends,¹⁴ and  every advance in the experimental method is sure to aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the schools in the past.¹⁵

DAWSON: What ‘kind of intelligence’ do you mean, precisely, and what useful ends? You say growth is the ultimate goal of education. And for you this means solving the immediate problems posed by the environment. Does this imply a practical, scientific intelligence aimed at power over nature?

DEWEY: Yes. We are not interested in feeling and ideas turned upon themselves, an enjoyment of an inner landscape. They must be methods in acts which modify conditions. Indeed, even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life - not a temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. The very word art may become associated not with specific transformations of things…but with stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences.¹⁶

DAWSON: I am reminded of your earlier statement that knowledge and thought are never a matter of contemplation. Your views state in a simplified and explicit form principles that have been taken for granted by liberal or democratic educationalists everywhere.

DEWEY: And why not by you?

DAWSON: Above all, I believe it is necessary for Western man to recover the use of his higher spiritual faculties - his powers of contemplation - which have become atrophied by centuries of neglect during which the mind and will of Western man has concentrated on the conquest of power - political, economic and technological.¹⁷

DEWEY: On that we disagree.

DAWSON: Yes. And, as with our other points of disagreement, the reason is that one’s philosophy of education depends on one’s philosophy of man.

DEWEY: Yes. How one educates a human being depends on what one believes a human being to be.

DAWSON: Human beings are not, as you believe, armed only with genetics and instincts. We are not like baby crocodiles solving the problems our environment presents from the moment they are hatch from the egg. We are armed with rationality, which produces culture. And education is the process of enculturation.¹⁸ It is not passed down with our genes, but it is of immeasurable benefit to the young. It has contributed inestimably to human success. The child does not have to be an original thinker.

DEWEY: You don’t agree, then, that past solutions to past problems must not be allowed to concern us in the present?

DAWSON: As one of our finest novelists are written, 'the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ In our traditions we find wisdom beyond our present powers of perception. The spiritual traditions of mankind are great channels for the discovery and recovery of meaning.¹⁹ And it is primarily the job of parents, not the state, to transmit culture to their offspring.

DEWEY: Why not the state?

DAWSON: To put the point simply, parents know their children better and care more about them. Education is not merely the modification of stimuli in the aim of growth conceived as manipulation and domination of the immediate environment. It is, as Aquinas said, the ‘handing over’ of what one learns and contemplates to others. This is real group work and community.

DEWEY: We agree that education is about community. But I don’t follow you when you say that tradition is passed on.

DAWSON: Culture, as its name denotes, is an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of “folkways” into which the individual has to be initiated.

DEWEY: And you hold that among these ‘folkways’ are the world’s great spiritual traditions?

DAWSON: Yes, not just folkways but in fact the great highways that have led mankind from remote antiquity throughout history to now.

DEWEY: You are saying, then, that culture is inseparable from education - and that includes religion?

DAWSON: Yes, culture is inseparable from education. No doubt enculturation is a far wider process than what is commonly known as education, for we apply the word “education” only to a very specialized type of enculturation—the formal teaching of particular kinds of knowledge and behavior to the younger members of the community through particular institutions. And the most important of all the processes by which culture is transmitted—the acquisition of speech—takes place before formal education begins. Even among primitive peoples this “enculturation” is quite a conscious systematic process, and the youth is initiated into the life and traditions of the tribe by a regular system of training and instruction which finds its climax in the initiation rites.²⁰

DEWEY: But that is antisocial. If each community has its own traditions, isolation and exclusiveness result. That is the case wherever one group has interests ‘of its own’ which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group.

DAWSON: You see this as threatening what you call the ‘pooled intelligence’ of the ‘total attitude’ of the democratic ideal?

DEWEY: Yes. For two reasons. 1) What makes social groups more democratic is pushing beyond their narrower interests to seek out more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest with other groups. Avoiding conflict means cultivating the recognition of mutual interests, not enlarging differences. And (2) the democratic ideal is fostered when freer interaction between social groups is sought.²¹

DAWSON: It was the creed of the Enlightenment that Western civilization was destined to expand by the progressive influence of science and trade and humanitarian ideals until it became a true world civilization, so that in the distant future our descendants might hope to see “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” This is no ignoble ideal, and it still commands the allegiance of the enlightened elements in Western democracy. But though we have achieved the Parliament of Man and the Federation of the World in the form of the United Nations, we have not got a world civilization; and the very existence of Western civilization itself is in question.

DEWEY: Why do you believe that?

DAWSON: The American way of life was built on a threefold tradition of freedom—political, economic and religious—and if the new secularist forces were to subjugate these freedoms to a monolithic technological order, it would destroy the foundations on which American culture was based. The American way of life can only maintain its character within the general framework of Western Christian culture. If this relation is lost, something essential to the life of the nation will be lost and American democracy itself will become subordinated to the technological order.

DEWEY: I believe that a technological order would bring with it new problem solving powers to help us grow.

DAWSON: We must face the fact that the vast expansion of man’s external powers by science and technology which are the creation of human reason have done nothing to strengthen the power of reason in the moral order which is its proper domain. For the moral order and the technological order have become out of gear with one another, and as the technological order has advanced and become stronger, the moral order has grown weaker. The technological order lends itself most easily to the service of the will to power which, as Nietzsche saw, is a fundamentally amoral power, destructive of moral values. It resembles those jinn of whom we read in the Arabian Nights that were ready to do anything, good or bad, in the service of any man who possessed the word of power or the talisman.²²

DEWEY: There is no moral order that transcends whatever one society forms pragmatically, and there is no good apart from growth.

DAWSON: If there is no transcendent moral order, then growth is not objectively good either. It is ultimately indistinguishable from the will to power. And it is obvious that this amoral technological system is entirely opposed to the ideals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism which have inspired the growth of modern democracy. It is true that liberalism was never entirely consistent in this respect, for it was economic individualism and free competition of economic liberalism which laid the foundations of the technological order in the new industrial society of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless the liberals believed that the technological servitude of the factory system would be compensated by the advantages of political liberty and popular education, no less than by the growing prosperity of the middle classes who formed the new élite. They were honestly convinced that the conflict between human nature and social injustice would be solved or ameliorated by political liberty and economic progress, and if they were wrong, their optimism, on the whole, was more justifiable than the pessimism of the Marxian Socialists with their theory of the increasing misery of the proletariat.²³

DEWEY: What makes you think they were wrong? That I am wrong? Many of us still believe that heaven can be created on earth. Human nature is putty in our hands. What Bertrand Russell called ‘the shining society that is to be’ awaits us.

DAWSON: Human nature is not totally malleable. There are limits to its potential development, and it has innate obstacles to the realisation of ‘the shining society’ you aim at.

DEWEY: What makes you believe that?

DAWSON: History has revealed that the modern Western synthesis of political liberalism and economic technocracy involves certain moral weaknesses and contradictions in the system which make it incapable of providing a satisfactory answer to the totalitarian challenge. For while the democratic technological society is free, it lacks the higher moral aims which alone can justify the immense developments of technological power and organization. The system exists primarily to satisfy the material needs and demands of the consumers, and these demands are artificially determined by the advertisers who are the agents of the producers, so that the whole system has a circular movement and feeds upon itself.

DEWEY: I believe it will work - eventually. What alternative is there?

DAWSON: There is an alternative which has been ignored both by the liberal rationalists who put their trust in individual reason guided by self-interest and by the psychologists who asserted the power of irrational impulses and the politicians and philosophers who exalted the will to power. This alternative is represented by the traditional religious or philosophical doctrine which solves the psychological and moral conflict by reference to a higher order of transcendent truths and values and ends, to which both the life of the individual and that of society are subordinated. The strength of this solution is that it, and it alone, provides a principle of co-ordination.

DEWEY: And what is that principle?

DAWSON: Seen from this angle the modern progress of science and technology acquires a new meaning. The technological order which today threatens spiritual freedom and even human existence by the unlimited powers which it puts at the service of the human passion and will loses all its terrors as soon as it is subordinated to a higher principle. Technology that is freed from the domination of individual self-interest and the mass cult of power would then fall into its place as a providential instrument in the creation of a spiritual order. But this is impossible, so long as our society remains devoid of all spiritual aims.²⁴

DEWEY: There are no spiritual aims.

DAWSON: And yet you talk as though there are. You mentioned Sidney Hook earlier, who has condensed liberalism into the definition ‘faith in intelligence’. The unintentional irony there reveals that man cannot avoid faith, even if it is faith in reason. And you have yourself spoken in spiritual terms of the church of democracy, and indeed the totalitarianism that history shows democracy has insufficient checks against is, I suggest, an attempt to provide a surrogate religion, answering a yearning to fill a spiritual void.

DEWEY: There is no problem we cannot reform. Reform is the soul of my vision. Man has no insurmountable built-in faults. Indeed, he has no built-in anything. External influences make him what he is, and education is chief among these. There is no limit to what it can achieve - no limit to progress along the path to perfectibility.

DAWSON: That view has come to us from the Enlightenment. Godwin, for example, representative of its Utopian wing, believed that there is no human evil that education could not eventually remedy. The ‘shining society’ always beckons. The Golden Age exists not in the past, but the future. And yet what political horrors this view always leads to! The soul of reform, ultimately, is reform of soul.

1. Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston, 1948), p.177

2. Democracy and Education (Free Press, 1966), p.122

3. School and Society, p.100-1

4. Experience and Education (Collier Books, 1963), p.40, 56, 58

5. EE, 59

6. EE, 72

7. DE, p.157-158

8. DE, p. 148

9. DE p.180

10. DE, p.341-2

11. DE, p.191

12. DE, p.358

13. (DE 215-6)

14. (DE, p.39

15. (DE, p339).

16. (DE. 135-6)

17. The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheen and Ward, 1961), p.1961

18. CWE, p.17

19. CWE, p.121

20. CWE, p.18

21. John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol 9 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–88), p.92

22. CWE, p.208

23. CWE, p.209

24. CWE, p.215