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William Bray - "Extracts from the Diary of William Bray, Esq. 1760 1800"

Oscar Wilde - "Essays and Lectures"

John Masefield - "Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger"

John Goodwin, this is an Alpha test version, your - "July, 1993 [Etext #75]"

Democracy and Education

J >> John Dewey >> Democracy and Education




(ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last
century and a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer
domestic and local, and consequently more or less incidental, but
are world-wide. They engage the best energies of an increasingly
large number of persons. The manufacturer, banker, and captain
of industry have practically displaced a hereditary landed gentry
as the immediate directors of social affairs. The problem of
social readjustment is openly industrial, having to do with the
relations of capital and labor. The great increase in the social
importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably
brought to the front questions having to do with the relationship
of schooling to industrial life. No such vast social
readjustment could occur without offering a challenge to an
education inherited from different social conditions, and without
putting up to education new problems.

(iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly
mentioned: Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical,
rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is
now technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting
from discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry,
bacteriology, etc. The economic revolution has stimulated
science by setting problems for solution, by producing greater
intellectual respect for mechanical appliances. And industry
received back payment from science with compound interest. As a
consequence, industrial occupations have infinitely greater
intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural possibilities
than they used to possess. The demand for such education as will
acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and
bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who
are without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the
machines they operate. Under the old regime all workers in a
craft were approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook.
Personal knowledge and ingenuity were developed within at least a
narrow range, because work was done with tools under the direct
command of the worker. Now the operator has to adjust himself to
his machine, instead of his tool to his own purposes. While the
intellectual possibilities of industry have multiplied,
industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great masses,
less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand
production for local markets. The burden of realizing the
intellectual possibilities inhering in work is thus thrown back
on the school.

(iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of
knowledge has become, in science, more experimental, less
dependent upon literary tradition, and less associated with
dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols. As a result,
the subject matter of industrial occupation presents not only
more of the content of science than it used to, but greater
opportunity for familiarity with the method by which knowledge is
made. The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too
immediate economic pressure to have a chance to produce a
knowledge like that of the worker in the laboratory. But in
schools, association with machines and industrial processes may
be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of the
students is insight. The separation of shop and laboratory,
where these conditions are fulfilled, is largely conventional,
the laboratory having the advantage of permitting the following
up of any intellectual interest a problem may suggest; the shop
the advantage of emphasizing the social bearings of the
scientific principle, as well as, with many pupils, of
stimulating a livelier interest.

(v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology
of learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into
line with the increased importance of industry in life. For
modern psychology emphasizes the radical importance of primitive
unlearned instincts of exploring, experimentation, and "trying
on." It reveals that learning is not the work of something
ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an organization
of original capacities into activities having significance. As
we have already seen (ante, p. 204), in older pupils work is to
educative development of raw native activities what play is for
younger pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work should
be gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but
carrying into work the elements of play, plus continuous
reorganization in behalf of greater control. The reader will
remark that these five points practically resume the main
contentions of the previous part of the work. Both practically
and philosophically, the key to the present educational situation
lies in a gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods
so as to utilize various forms of occupation typifying social
callings, and to bring out their intellectual and moral content.
This reconstruction must relegate purely literary methods --
including textbooks--and dialectical methods to the position of
necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent development of
consecutive and cumulative activities.

But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a
technical preparation for industries and professions as they now
operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial
conditions in the school. The problem is not that of making the
schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing
the factors of industry to make school life more active, more
full of immediate meaning, more connected with out-of-school
experience. The problem is not easy of solution. There is a
standing danger that education will perpetuate the older
traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the
newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of
acquiescence in the untransformed, unrationalized, and
unsocialized phases of our defective industrial regime. Put in
concrete terms, there is danger that vocational education will be
interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means
of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits.
Education would then become an instrument of perpetuating
unchanged the existing industrial order of society, instead of
operating as a means of its transformation. The desired
transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way. It
signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied in
something which makes the lives of others better worth living,
and which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together
more perceptible -- which breaks down the barriers of distance
between them. It denotes a state of affairs in which the
interest of each in his work is uncoerced and intelligent: based
upon its congeniality to his own aptitudes. It goes without
saying that we are far from such a social state; in a literal and
quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it. But in principle,
the quality of social changes already accomplished lies in this
direction. There are more ample resources for its achievement
now than ever there have been before. No insuperable obstacles,
given the intelligent will for its realization, stand in the way.

Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the
adoption of educational methods calculated to effect the change
than upon anything else. For the change is essentially a change
in the quality of mental disposition -- an educative change.
This does not mean that we can change character and mind by
direct instruction and exhortation, apart from a change in
industrial and political conditions. Such a conception
contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes
of participative response in social affairs. But it does mean
that we may produce in schools a projection in type of the
society we should like to realize, and by forming minds in accord
with it gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant
features of adult society. Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to
say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not found in
poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact
that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them,
which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For
such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a
desire to slight and evade. Neither men's hearts nor their minds
are in their work. On the other hand, those who are not only
much better off in worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if
not monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are shut
off from equality and generality of social intercourse. They are
stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and display; they try to
make up for the distance which separates them from others by the
impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment which
they can make upon others.

It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of
vocational education to perpetuate this division in a hardened
form. Taking its stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it
would assume that some are to continue to be wage earners under
economic conditions like the present, and would aim simply to
give them what is termed a trade education -- that is, greater
technical efficiency. Technical proficiency is often sadly
lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts -- not merely
for the sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but
for the greater happiness found in work. For no one cares for
what one cannot half do. But there is a great difference between
a proficiency limited to immediate work, and a competency
extended to insight into its social bearings; between efficiency
in carrying out the plans of others and in one forming one's own.
At present, intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes
both the employing and the employed class. While the latter
often have no concern with their occupation beyond the money
return it brings, the former's outlook may be confined to profit
and power. The latter interest generally involves much greater
intellectual initiation and larger survey of conditions. For it
involves the direction and combination of a large number of
diverse factors, while the interest in wages is restricted to
certain direct muscular movements. But none the less there is a
limitation of intelligence to technical and non- humane,
non-liberal channels, so far as the work does not take in its
social bearings. And when the animating motive is desire for
private profit or personal power, this limitation is inevitable.
In fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane
disposition often lies with the economically unfortunate, who
have not experienced the hardening effects of a one-sided control
of the affairs of others.

Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of
departure from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely
to assume and to perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and
thus to become an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of
social predestination. Those who are in a position to make their
wishes good, will demand a liberal, a cultural occupation, and
one which fits for directive power the youth in whom they are
directly interested. To split the system, and give to others,
less fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly as
specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency
for transferring the older division of labor and leisure, culture
and service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a
society nominally democratic. Such a vocational education
inevitably discounts the scientific and historic human
connections of the materials and processes dealt with. To
include such things in narrow trade education would be to waste
time; concern for them would not be "practical." They are
reserved for those who have leisure at command--the leisure due
to superior economic resources. Such things might even be
dangerous to the interests of the controlling class, arousing
discontent or ambitions "beyond the station" of those working
under the direction of others. But an education which
acknowledges the full intellectual and social meaning of a
vocation would include instruction in the historic background of
present conditions; training in science to give intelligence and
initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production;
and study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future
worker into touch with the problems of the day and the various
methods proposed for its improvement. Above all, it would train
power of readaptation to changing conditions so that future
workers would not become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon
them. This ideal has to contend not only with the inertia of
existing educational traditions, but also with the opposition of
those who are entrenched in command of the industrial machinery,
and who realize that such an educational system if made general
would threaten their ability to use others for their own ends.
But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and
enlightened social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence
of social reorganization upon educational reconstruction. It is
accordingly an encouragement to those believing in a better order
to undertake the promotion of a vocational education which does
not subject youth to the demands and standards of the present
system, but which utilizes its scientific and social factors to
develop a courageous intelligence, and to make intelligence
practical and executive.

Summary. A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity
which renders service to others and engages personal powers in
behalf of the accomplishment of results. The question of the
relation of vocation to education brings to a focus the various
problems previously discussed regarding the connection of thought
with bodily activity; of individual conscious development with
associated life; of theoretical culture with practical behavior
having definite results; of making a livelihood with the worthy
enjoyment of leisure. In general, the opposition to recognition
of the vocational phases of life in education (except for the
utilitarian three R's in elementary schooling) accompanies the
conservation of aristocratic ideals of the past. But, at the
present juncture, there is a movement in behalf of something
called vocational training which, if carried into effect, would
harden these ideas into a form adapted to the existing industrial
regime. This movement would continue the traditional liberal
or cultural education for the few economically able to enjoy it,
and would give to the masses a narrow technical trade education
for specialized callings, carried on under the control of others.
This scheme denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation of the
older social division, with its counterpart intellectual and
moral dualisms. But it means its continuation under conditions
where it has much less justification for existence. For
industrial life is now so dependent upon science and so
intimately affects all forms of social intercourse, that there is
an opportunity to utilize it for development of mind and
character. Moreover, a right educational use of it would react
upon intelligence and interest so as to modify, in connection
with legislation and administration, the socially obnoxious
features of the present industrial and commercial order. It
would turn the increasing fund of social sympathy to constructive
account, instead of leaving it a somewhat blind philanthropic
sentiment.

It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and
ability to share in social control, and ability to become masters
of their industrial fate. It would enable them to saturate with
meaning the technical and mechanical features which are so marked
a feature of our machine system of production and distribution.
So much for those who now have the poorer economic opportunities.
With the representatives of the more privileged portion of the
community, it would increase sympathy for labor, create a
disposition of mind which can discover the culturing elements in
useful activity, and increase a sense of social responsibility.
The crucial position of the question of vocational education at
present is due, in other words, to the fact that it concentrates
in a specific issue two fundamental questions: -- Whether
intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity
which puts nature to human use, and whether individual culture is
best secured under egoistic or social conditions. No discussion
of details is undertaken in this chapter, because this
conclusion but summarizes the discussion of the previous
chapters, XV to XXII, inclusive.


Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education

1. A Critical Review. Although we are dealing with the
philosophy of education, DO definition of philosophy has yet been
given; nor has there been an explicit consideration of the nature
of a philosophy of education. This topic is now introduced by a
summary account of the logical order implied in the previous
discussions, for the purpose of bringing out the philosophic
issues involved. Afterwards we shall undertake a brief
discussion, in more specifically philosophical terms, of the
theories of knowledge and of morals implied in different
educational ideals as they operate in practice. The prior
chapters fall logically into three parts.

I. The first chapters deal with education as a social need and
function. Their purpose is to outline the general features of
education as the process by which social groups maintain their
continuous existence. Education was shown to be a process of
renewal of the meanings of experience through a process of
transmission, partly incidental to the ordinary companionship or
intercourse of adults and youth, partly deliberately instituted
to effect social continuity. This process was seen to involve
control and growth of both the immature individual and the group
in which he lives.

This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account
of the quality of the social group concerned--the kind of society
aiming at its own perpetuation through education. The general
discussion was then specified by application to social groups
which are intentionally progressive, and which aim at a greater
variety of mutually shared interests in distinction from those
which aim simply at the preservation of established customs.
Such societies were found to be democratic in quality, because of
the greater freedom allowed the constituent members, and the
conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously
socialized interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of
customs operating under the control of a superior class. The
sort of education appropriate to the development of a democratic
community was then explicitly taken as the criterion of the
further, more detailed analysis of education.

II. This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen
to imply the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing
of experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized
meaning or social content, and as to increase the capacity of
individuals to act as directive guardians of this reorganization.
(See Chapters VI-VII.) This distinction was then used to outline
the respective characters of subject matter and method. It also
defined their unity, since method in study and learning upon this
basis is just the consciously directed movement of reorganization
of the subject matter of experience. From this point of view the
main principles of method and subject matter of learning were
developed (Chapters XIII-XIV.)

III. Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate
principles by force of contrast, this phase of the discussion
took for granted the democratic criterion and its application in
present social life. In the subsequent chapters (XVIII-XXII) we
considered the present limitation of its actual realization.
They were found to spring from the notion that experience
consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests, each
having its own independent value, material, and method, each
checking every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by
the others, forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education.
We then proceeded to an analysis of the various assumptions
underlying this segregation. On the practical side, they were
found to have their cause in the divisions of society into more
or less rigidly marked-off classes and groups -- in other words,
in obstruction to full and flexible social interaction and
intercourse. These social ruptures of continuity were seen to
have their intellectual formulation in various dualisms or
antitheses -- such as that of labor and leisure, practical and
intellectual activity, man and nature, individuality and
association, culture and vocation. In this discussion, we found
that these different issues have their counterparts in
formulations which have been made in classic philosophic systems;
and that they involve the chief problems of philosophy -- such as
mind (or spirit) and matter, body and mind, the mind and the
world, the individual and his relationships to others, etc.
Underlying these various separations we found the fundamental
assumption to be an isolation of mind from activity involving
physical conditions, bodily organs, material appliances, and
natural objects. Consequently, there was indicated a philosophy
which recognizes the origin, place, and function of mind in an
activity which controls the environment. Thus we have completed
the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the first portion
of this book: such as the biological continuity of human impulses
and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the growth
of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common
purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the
uses made of it in the social medium; the necessity of
utilization of individual variations in desire and thinking for a
progressively developing society; the essential unity of method
and subject matter; the intrinsic continuity of ends and means;
the recognition of mind as thinking which perceives and tests the
meanings of behavior. These conceptions are consistent with the
philosophy which sees intelligence to be the purposive
reorganization, through action, of the material of experience;
and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies
mentioned.

2. The Nature of Philosophy. Our further task is to extract and
make explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these
considerations. We have already virtually described, though not
defined, philosophy in terms of the problems with which it deals:
and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known things, but to
the considerations which govern conduct.

Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of
subject matter. For this reason, the definition of such
conceptions as generality, totality, and ultimateness is most
readily reached from the side of the disposition toward the world
which they connote. In any literal and quantitative sense, these
terms do not apply to the subject matter of knowledge, for
completeness and finality are out of the question. The very
nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process forbids. In
a less rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to
philosophy. For obviously it is to mathematics, physics,
chemistry, biology, anthropology, history, etc. that we must go,
not to philosophy, to find out the facts of the world. It is for
the sciences to say what generalizations are tenable about the
world and what they specifically are. But when we ask what sort
of permanent disposition of action toward the world the
scientific disclosures exact of us we are raising a philosophic
question.


From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless
task of a quantitative summation. It means rather consistency of
mode of response in reference to the plurality of events which
occur. Consistency does not mean literal identity; for since the
same thing does not happen twice, an exact repetition of a
reaction involves some maladjustment. Totality means
continuity -- the carrying on of a former habit of action with
the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing. Instead
of signifying a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means
keeping the balance in a multitude of diverse actions, so that
each borrows and gives significance to every other. Any person
who is open-minded and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has
concentration and responsibility in connecting them has, in so
far, a philosophic disposition. One of the popular senses of
philosophy is calm and endurance in the face of difficulty and
loss; it is even supposed to be a power to bear pain without
complaint. This meaning is a tribute to the influence of the
Stoic philosophy rather than an attribute of philosophy in
general. But in so far as it suggests that the wholeness
characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to extract
meaning, from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and
to embody what is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is
justified in any scheme. An analogous interpretation
applies to the generality and ultimateness of philosophy. Taken
literally, they are absurd pretensions; they indicate insanity.
Finality does not mean, however, that experience is ended and
exhausted, but means the disposition to penetrate to deeper
levels of meaning -- to go below the surface and find out the
connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. In like
manner the philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it
is averse to taking anything as isolated; it tries to place an
act in its context -- which constitutes its significance.
It is of assistance to connect philosophy with thinking in its
distinction from knowledge. Knowledge, grounded knowledge, is
science; it represents objects which have been settled, ordered,
disposed of rationally. Thinking, on the other hand, is
prospective in reference. It is occasioned by an unsettlement
and it aims at overcoming a disturbance. Philosophy is thinking
what the known demands of us -- what responsive attitude it
exacts. It is an idea of what is possible, not a record of
accomplished fact. Hence it is hypothetical, like all thinking.
It presents an assignment of something to be done -- something to
be tried. Its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can
be achieved only in action) but in defining difficulties and
suggesting methods for dealing with them. Philosophy might
almost be
described as thinking which has become conscious of
itself -- which has generalized its place, function, and value in
experience.

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