Democracy and Education

J >> John Dewey >> Democracy and Education

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I have tried to make this the most accurate text possible but I
am sure that there are still mistakes. Please feel free to email
me any errors or mistakes that you find. Citing the Chapter and
paragraph. Haradda@aol.com and davidr@inconnect.com are my email
addresses for now. David Reed

I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a
elementary school teacher for more years than I can remember.
Thanks.

Democracy and Education
by John Dewey

Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
Chapter Three: Education as Direction
Chapter Four: Education as Growth
Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and
Humanism
Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals

Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life

1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable
distinction between living and inanimate things is that the
former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck
resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow
struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is
shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to
react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow,
much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its
own continued action. While the living thing may easily be
crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the
energies which act upon it into means of its own further
existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses
its identity as a living thing.

As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies
in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the
material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it
turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is
growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to
account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it
grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be
said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for
its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use
it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the
environment.

In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up
indefinitely. After a while they succumb; they die. The
creature is not equal to the task of indefinite self-renewal.
But continuity of the life process is not dependent upon the
prolongation of the existence of any one individual.
Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous
sequence. And though, as the geological record shows, not merely
individuals but also species die out, the life process continues
in increasingly complex forms. As some species die out, forms
better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they
struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life means
continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living
organisms.

We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms -- as a
physical thing. But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole
range of experience, individual and racial. When we see a book
called the Life of Lincoln we do not expect to find within its
covers a treatise on physiology. We look for an account of
social antecedents; a description of early surroundings, of the
conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief episodes in
the development of character; of signal struggles and
achievements; of the individual's hopes, tastes, joys and
sufferings. In precisely similar fashion we speak of the life of
a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of the American nation.
"Life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and
defeats, recreations and occupations.

We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. And
to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the
principle of continuity through renewal applies. With the
renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings,
the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and
practices. The continuity of any experience, through renewing of
the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its broadest
sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one
of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city
as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without
language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual,
each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group,
in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.

The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one
of the constituent members in a social group determine the
necessity of education. On one hand, there is the contrast
between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group --
its future sole representatives -- and the maturity of the adult
members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group. On
the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature
members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers,
but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes,
information, skill, and practices of the mature members:
otherwise the group will cease its characteristic life. Even in
a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what
the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves.
With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original
capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the
elders increases. Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the
bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the
life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of
thoughtful pains are required. Beings who are born not only
unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the
social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively
interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
biological life. This transmission occurs by means of
communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the
older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals,
hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of
society who are passing out of the group life to those who are
coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members
who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate
the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of
necessity.

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it
is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the
death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an
epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in
age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible
through transmission of ideas and practices the constant
reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not
automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and
thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will
relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the
human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves
without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire
the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The
young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency
with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers
needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under
tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to
all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral
achievements of humanity!

2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the
necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of
a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism.
But justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a
means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal
notion of education. Schools are, indeed, one important method
of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature;
but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a
relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the
necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can
we make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true
context.

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in
transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie
between the words common, community, and communication. Men live
in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common;
and communication is the way in which they come to possess things
in common. What they must have in common in order to form a
community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a
common understanding -- like-mindedness as the

sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from
one to another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons
would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces. The
communication which insures participation in a common
understanding is one which secures similar emotional and
intellectual dispositions -- like ways of responding to
expectations and requirements.

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity,
any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so
many feet or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may
institute a more intimate association between human beings
separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between
dwellers under the same roof. Individuals do not even compose a
social group because they all work for a common end. The parts
of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common
result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were
all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that
they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they
would form a community. But this would involve communication.
Each would have to know what the other was about and would have
to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own
purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.

We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most
social group there are many relations which are not as yet
social. A large number of human relationships in any social
group are still upon the machine-like plane. Individuals use one
another so as to get desired results, without reference to the
emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used.
Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of
position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools,
mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and
child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and
governed, remain upon this level, they form no true social group,
no matter how closely their respective activities touch one
another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action and
results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a
communication of interests.

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.
To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and
changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and
felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude
modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try
the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some
experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated,
and you will find your own attitude toward your experience
changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations.
The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.
To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another
would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the
life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and
catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of
another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's
own experience. All communication is like art. It may fairly be
said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally
social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate
in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine
way does it lose its educative power.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching
and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of
living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience;
it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility
for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. A man
really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would
have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to
extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement between
the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the
young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense
stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will
render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.

3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a
marked difference between the education which every one gets from
living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just
continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young.
In the former case the education is incidental; it is natural and
important, but it is not the express reason of the association.
While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of
the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic,
political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and
improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its
original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to
secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil
influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and
secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part,
because of enslavement to others, etc. Only gradually was the
by-product of the institution, its effect upon the quality and
extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still
was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct
of the institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart
from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the
intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human
association under which the world's work is carried on receives
little attention as compared with physical output.

But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as
an immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy
to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon
their disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to
some external and tangible result, it is not so easy as in
dealing with adults. The need of training is too evident; the
pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits is
too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account.
Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in
a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are
forming the powers which will secure this ability. If humanity
has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of
every institution is its distinctively human effect -- its effect
upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that this lesson
has been learned largely through dealings with the young.

We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational
process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind
of education -- that of direct tuition or schooling. In
undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching
and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed
dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association
which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special
devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are
inducted into full social membership. For the most part, they
depend upon children learning the customs of the adults,
acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in
what the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct,
taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an
apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic
plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and
thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem
preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was
going on in order that one might learn.

But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of
the young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct
sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly
difficult except in the case of the less advanced occupations.
Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that
playful imitation is less and less adequate to reproduce its
spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult activities thus
depends upon a prior training given with this end in view.
Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit material -- studies
-- are devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated
to a special group of persons.

Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all
the resources and achievements of a complex society. It also
opens a way to a kind of experience which would not be accessible
to the young, if they were left to pick up their training in
informal association with others, since books and the symbols of
knowledge are mastered.

But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition
from indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit,
whether directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and
vital. These qualities compensate, in some measure, for the
narrowness of available opportunities. Formal instruction, on
the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead -- abstract and
bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation. What
accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is at least
put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists
with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
urgent daily interests.

But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored
in symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and
objects. Such material is relatively technical and superficial.
Taking the ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is
artificial. For this measure is connection with practical
concerns. Such material exists in a world by itself,
unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
There is the standing danger that the material of formal
instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools,
isolated from the subject matter of life- experience. The
permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view.
Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
social life, but which remain largely matters of technical
information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in
schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the
notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with
all human association that affects conscious life, and which
identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and
the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition
of literacy.

Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance
between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the
intentional, modes of education. When the acquiring of
information and of technical intellectual skill do not influence
the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience
fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates
only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic specialists. To
avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are
aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and
what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the
formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes
an increasingly delicate task with every development of special
schooling.

Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in
being. Since this continuance can be secured only by constant
renewals, life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and
reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social
life. This education consists primarily in transmission through
communication. Communication is a process of sharing experience
till it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition
of both the parties who partake in it. That the ulterior
significance of every mode of human association lies in the
contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of
experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the
immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is
educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an
important part of the purpose of the association in connection
with the association of the older with the younger. As societies
become more complex in structure and resources, the need of
formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal
teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of
creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in
more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This
danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of
the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and
technical modes of skill.

Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function

1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a
community or social group sustains itself through continuous
self-renewal, and that this renewal takes place by means of the
educational growth of the immature members of the group. By
various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society
transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust
trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a
fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these
words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth.
We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up -- words which
express the difference of level which education aims to cover.
Etymologically, the word education means just a process of
leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process
in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding
activity -- that is, a shaping into the standard form of social
activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the general
features of the way in which a social group brings up its
immature members into its own social form.

Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of
experience till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas
current in the social group, the problem is evidently not one of
mere physical forming. Things can be physically transported in
space; they may be bodily conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations
cannot be physically extracted and inserted. How then are they
communicated? Given the impossibility of direct contagion or
literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the method by
which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the
older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves.
The answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of
the environment in calling out certain responses. The required
beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be
plastered on. But the particular medium in which an individual
exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than another;
it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act
successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens
others as a condition of winning the approval of others. Thus it
gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain
disposition of action. The words "environment," "medium" denote
something more than surroundings which encompass an individual.
They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his
own active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course,
continuous with its surroundings; but the environing
circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an
environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the
influences which affect it. On the other hand, some things which
are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a
human creature, may form his environment even more truly than
some of the things close to him. The things with which a man
varies are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the
astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which
he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is
most intimately his environment. The environment of an
antiquarian, as an antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of
human life with which he is concerned, and the relics,
inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections with that
period.

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