The New Scholarship on Dewey PDF
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THE NEW SCHOLARSHIP ON DEWEY Edited by Jim Garrison Reprinted from Studies in Philosophy and Education, Volume 13, Nos. 3-4, 1994/95 SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. Llbrarv of Congress Catalog1ng-ln-Publ1catlon Data The new scholarship on Dewey I edlted by Jl~ Garrlson. p. CII. ISBN 978-0-7923-3446-0 ISBN 978-94-011-0071-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-0071-7 1. Dewey, John, 1859-1952. I. Garrison, Jalles W., 1949- B945.D44N47 1995 191--dc20 95-8387 ISBN 978-0-7923-3446-0 Printed an acid-free paper Caver: This bust of John Dewey was sculpted by Alexander Portnoff, a Philadelphia artist, in the early nineteen thirties. It stands in Judd HaU at the University of Chicago. Two other copies are known to have been cast but their present locations are unknown. AU Rights Reserved © 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1995 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permis sion from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS JIM GARRISON / Introduction: Education and the New Scholarship on John Dewey JOHN J. HOLDER / An Epistemological Foundation for Thinking: A Deweyan Approach 7 PHILIP W. JACKSON / If We Took Dewey's Aesthetics Seriously, How Would the Arts Be Taught? 25 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN / Popular Art and Education 35 STEVEN A. FESMIRE / Educating the Moral Artist: Dramatic Rehearsal in Moral Education 45 SIEBREN MIEDEMA / The Beyond in the Midst: The Relevance of Dewey's Philosophy of Religion for Education 61 THOMAS M. ALEXANDER / Educating the Democratic Heart: Pluralism, Traditions and the Humanities 75 J.E. TILES / Education for Democracy 93 GERT BlESTA / Pragmatism as a Pedagogy of Communicative Action 105 MARY LEACH / (Re)searching Dewey for Feminist Imaginaries: Linguistic Continuity, Discourse and Gossip 123 JAMES D. MARSHALL / On What We May Hope: Rorty on Dewey and Foucault 139 RAYMOND D. BOISVERT / John Dewey: An "Old-Fashioned" Reformer 157 CRAIG A. CUNNINGHAM I Dewey's Metaphysics and the Self 175 SUSAN LAIRD / Rethinking "Coeducation" 193 LARRY A. HICKMAN / Science Education for a Life Curriculum 211 SABRi BUYUKDUVENCi / John Dewey's Impact on Turkish Education 225 Biography of Contributors 233 Introduction: Education and the New Scholarship on John Dewey JIM GARRISON 303 WMH, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0313, U.S.A. A new scholarship on John Dewey has emerged among academic philosophers in the last decade. Many of these essays are by those philosophers most respon sible for creating this new scholarship. Contributors to this volume are distrib uted evenly between philosophy department faculty and philosophers in colleges of education. Many on both faculties have experienced the frustration of trying to convince their colleagues that they often seriously misunderstand and misap ply Dewey, or that he has anything to say to the so-called postmodem age. This is the first collection to bring together the philosophers that have framed the new scholarship with Deweyan scholars in schools of education eager to evaluate, extend, and apply it. The result is what I call "Education and the New Scholar ship on John Dewey." So, what is the new scholarship, and what is its relation to issues in educa tion? The best way to find out is to read these essays as well as other works by the authors collected here.' One theme of the new scholarship especially well represented in this volume is the tendency to place Dewey's aesthetics at the center of his thinking instead of his theory of inquiry, theory of democratic social relations, or even his philosophy of education. If the new scholarship's emphasis on Dewey's aesthetics is correct, then we will need to reconsider our understanding of the remainder of his holistic philosophy. Communication, cre ativity, democratic community, religion, and gender are just some of the aspects of Dewey's educational philosophy that these essays reexamine from the per spective of the new scholarship. Many contributors "(re )search," to use Mary Leach's refreshing locution, review, and reconstruct Dewey's philosophy for their own contemporary pur poses. Those who think that Dewey, the philosopher of reconstruction, would reject the idea that his own thought would require reconstruction to better respond to the vicissitudes of new times and contexts simply fail to grasp one of Dewey's most important messages. Several of the authors say something that positions Dewey in one posture or another regarding the "postmodem" and "poststructualist" critiques of moder nity advanced by such thinkers as Theodor Adomo, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and especially Michel Foucault, as well as the self-styled "postmodem bourgeois liberal" pragmatist Richard Rorty. Dewey usually, but not always, gets the better of the juxtapositioning. Deweyan pragmatism is contrasted with critical theory as well, especially the work of Habennas. What remains to do, for the reader I Studies in Philosophy and Education 13: 169-174, 1994/95. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Puhlishers. 170 JIM GARRISON intrigued enough to have come this far, is to provide short expositions of the contents of each contribution. John J. Holder starts us off well in his "An Epistemological Foundation for Thinking: A Deweyan Approach." This paper addresses issues of immense importance to philosophers and educators. Holder provides a Deweyan critique of the epistemology of the fonns of cognitivism currently dominant in the field of education. The core of the critique is that pure cognitivism must construct a false dualism between creative thinking and rational thinking. Holder uses Thomas M. Alexander's notion of "naturalistic emergentism" to connect Dewey to some of the most exciting current research on lhinking. The result is a natural istic epistemology that establishes continuity between the noncognitive back ground of Dewey's theory of thinking (e.g., "qualitative thought," needs, emotion, habit, and imagination) with the more familiar cognitive foreground. Holder concludes with specific implications for educational research that empha size the role of imagination in both rational thinking and creative thinking. Philip W. Jackson's essay, "If We Took Dewey's Aesthetics Seriously, How Would the Arts Be Taught?" takes up Dewey's notions about qualitative thought, imagination, feeling, and reflection, and relates them directly to questions about teaching and the curriculum. Jackson makes the case that aesthetics and arts education, with their emphasis on creativity and expressiveness, may be more basic than the so-called basics of E. D. Hirsch that emphasize rote memoriza tion. The argument holds if you believe that thinking is basic to education. Others in this volume make similar claims against Mortimer Adler and Alan Bloom, as well as Hirsch. Like Holder, Jackson is influenced by Dewey's insight that feelings, imagination, and art need not fall into a romanticist or subjectivist framework. At the same time Jackson asserts that aesthetic education can be rig orous, objective, and disciplined without confonning to the rigid structures of today's Discipline-Based-Art-Education. In his "Popular Art and Education," Richard Shustennan reviews and recon structs Dewey's aesthetics to analyze and legitimate popular art as having pow erful social and political as well as aesthetic significance. Shustennan is a social meliorist about popular art fonns. Acknowledging their flaws and abuses he believes the popular arts have great merit and will improve with careful aesthetic criticism. The function of philosophy for Dewey was cultural criticism. Richard does Deweyan critique and reconstruction with and on Dewey to serve social melioristic functions. One thing he ameliorates is the self-alienation we feel when we take pleasure in some culturally devalued art fonn. His belief is that criticism of all kinds, and not just aesthetic criticism, can help provide the social preconditions necessary for proper appreciation and melioration. Like Dewey, Shustennan denies any sharp separation between theory and practice. Recognizing that philosophical argument and critical demonstration of value alone will not actualize concrete social and cultural refonns, he feels that the popular arts must find their way into our school's curriculum and modes of teaching. That, as he clearly states, is why he wrote for a collection of essays on education. 2 INTRODUCTION 171 As the title "Educating the Moral Artist: Dramatic Rehearsal in Moral Edu cation" indicates, Steven A. Fesmire is eager to explore the relationships between the new scholarship's emphasis on Dewey's aesthetics, and the domain of moral education. Fesmire's paper is a fine example of how the new scholar ship discloses significant but overlooked ideas in Dewey's philosophy that require educators to reconsider how they understand and apply him. The notion that the morally educated individuals are "moral artist," (i.e., those able to understand and respond to their own unique needs and aspirations as well as those of others, challenges the tired conventions of moral education as merely memorizing maxims and blindly obeying rules. In his "The Beyond in the Midst: The Relevance of Dewey's Philosophy of Religion for Education," Siebren Miedema examines the sadly neglected topic of Dewey's philosophy of religion and its connection to his philosophy of educa tion. Miedema begins by emphasizing what he calls the "intersubjectivist tum" in both the critical-pragmatist and critical-theorist (e.g., Habermas) philosophi cal perspectives. Using recent studies on Dewey's philosophy of religion and Hans Joas' Deweyan critique of Habermas, Miedema argues that, unlike the critical theorist, the Deweyan pragmatist has valuable things to say to those interested in religious education. Siebren connects Joas' critique, with its focus on creativity, to Thomas A. Alexander's work on Dewey's aesthetics and its relation to the creation of the ideals of action that for Dewey had religious significance. In his "Educating the Democratic Heart: Pluralism, Traditions and the Humanities," Thomas M. Alexander argues that, contrary to scientistic interpre tations of Dewey, democratic education needs to be humanistic and aesthetic. An aesthetic vision of the world for Alexander involves the existential "need to experience meaning and value in an aesthetic, concrete manner." He calls this passionate quest the "Human Eros." The repeated emphasis on creativity in these papers should indicate to the reader that these Deweyans do not consider aesthetics and art education to be just about appreciating pretty pictures and poems, although they are about that also. That creativity has disappeared from the dialogue concerning education in our modem democracies is simply a sad statement about those republics and their schools. Alexander would restore heart to schools at all levels by restoring humanistic and aesthetic values. He seeks to accomplish such a restoration without following the political or religious conser vatives like Mortimer Adler and Alasdair MacIntyre, or those indifferent or hostile to science, like many of the champions of hermeneutics. Instead, Alexander wants to defend humanism, cultural pluralism, and intelligent social inquiry as integral to the democratic tradition. J. E. Tiles takes up and continues the discussion of democratic education in his "Education for Democracy." Tiles begins with Matthew Lipman's philoso phy for children in Hawai'i. Tiles is impressed by the project's emphasis on com munity, student participation, inquiry, and especially the idea of a disciplined conversation that has focus, succeeds in scratching beneath the surface, is chal lenging, interesting, and promotes pupils listening to each other carefully. Tiles 3 172 JIM GARRISON shows why philosophy as Dewey conceived it, that is, not just as subject matter but above all as methods, is especially important to developing disciplined con versations that provide a place in the public square for the largest number of diverse interests possible. Cultivating disciplined communication and inquiry, Tiles concludes, is necessary to nourish democratic cultures. Gert Biesta's "Pragmatism as a Pedagogy of Communicative Action" contin ues the theme of communication by exploring pedagogical possibilities in the tradition of John Dewey, Martin Buber, Klaus Mollenhauer, and Paulo Freire among others. Biesta challenges the three defining characteristics of what he calls "the modem anthropology of communication." They are the mind/body dualism, the atomistic view of the human subject as self-sufficient prior to social interaction, and the notion that mind or consciousness is always the independent variable that explains but is not itself explained. Biesta provides a detailed "prag matic anthropology" that challenges the modernist dogmas. The result is what he calls a "pedagogy of communicative action." His contribution, like others in this volume, shows that if we take Dewey seriously, we will need to reconstruct a great deal of our educational practice, research, and theory. Mary Leach gives the theme of communication and shared experience in Dewey an insightful and exciting feminist twist in her paper, "(RE)searching Dewey for Feminist Imaginaries: Linguistic Continuity, Discourse and Gossip." Leach finds Deweyan thought "friendly to feminist analysis," and identifies several compatibilities between Dewey's ideas about communication and a social practice she calls "serious gossip." Mary makes selective use of poststruc tualism, psychoanalytic work, and critical theory, in conjunction with Deweyan pragmatism, to provide a feminist critique of the discursive and textual politics of the West. The result is an original and valuable feminist reconstruction of Dewey's pragmatism. In "On What We May Hope: Rorty on Dewey and Foucault," James Marshall challenges Richard Rorty's claim that there is little difference between John Dewey and Michel Foucault except "over what we may hope." Marshall contrasts Dewey's and Foucault's thinking in five domains. They are the social sciences, methodology, rationality, the individual and the community, and the subject. Marshall's characterization and criticisms of Dewey and affirmation of some, although not all, of Foucault's controversial claims provide a valuable dialectical counterweight to the claims of the new scholarship. Raymond D. Boisvert advances four related theses in his "John Dewey: An 'Old-Fashioned' Reformer." First, Dewey is old-fashioned in the sense that he attempted to preserve the best of home education for public schooling. Second, Dewey saw education as practical, but not in the simplistic sense of providing job training. Dewey believed that education through, but not for, occupations provided a holistic integration of interests, habits, and actions. Third, Dewey did not simply derive his connections between democracy and education from the importance of an informed electorate, but from considerations of freedom, equality, widening the scope of interests, and consideration of others. Finally, Boisvert argues that all education for Dewey was moral education wherein the 4 INTRODUCTION 173 virtues of democratic character, e.g., cooperation and concern for the welfare of others, were especially important. Dewey believed that we should educate individuals to the limits of their capacity. Moral education particularly interested Dewey. So what does all that mean? Craig A. Cunningham's "Dewey's Metaphysics and the Self' illuminates the immense influence Dewey's metaphysics exercised on his theory of the self, including the moral self. Cunningham describes how Dewey's evolving ideas about metaphysics influenced, modified, and modulated his changing ideas about the self and what it meant to educate it. Cunningham explicitly remarks on the importance of Dewey's aesthetic sense of "self-realization." Cunningham conclusion that in the end Dewey decided that "there is no 'Self' to be 'real ized,' there is nothing 'in' the future possibilities of the self, no intrinsic essence, no 'brute core of existence,' no defining characteristics toward which to guide personal growth," will disturb many educators. Others, like myself, are intrigued and even enthusiastic. Susan Laird's essay, "Rethinking 'Coeducation'" examines an issue of consid erable contemporary interest to educators. Laird finds Dewey's thinking on co education either incompletely formulated or now anachronistic. Nonetheless, Susan finds Dewey's insights into the importance of coeducation for democratic life useful for clarifying what coeducation might mean in current debates. Reflecting on Dewey's views, their problems, and possibilities, Laird recon structs him in ways that provide scholars with valuable options for reconceiving democratic community. Larry A. Hickman's "Science Education for a Life Curriculum" explores some of the reasons provided by Dewey for why the public has tended to ignore or reject the application of scientific methods to perceived difficulties and pro vides three instances of this "flight from scientific thinking." Larry carefully sep arates Dewey's comprehension of the structure of the sciences and their cultural application from the often scientistic views of those who champion or condemn them. Hickman discusses Dewey's threefold program for improving scientific thinking within schools, and for the public, by employing "a life curriculum." In his article, "John Dewey's Impact on Turkish Education," Sabri Btiytik dtivenci examines the lasting impact of Dewey on Turkish Education basing his thoughts on Dewey's 1924 reports to the Turkish Ministry of Education and decades of subsequent practice according to them. Bliytikdtivenci ponders Deweyan pragmatism as a paradigm for dealing with educational problems and the harm it may have caused Turkish education when placed in an unreflective cultural context that he calls "Philosophylessness." Btiytikdtivenci is himself an admirer and defender of Deweyan pragmatism, but he cautions that any reform philosophy must consider its cultural context. It is a warning Dewey himself issued many times, and a caution that educators everywhere should consider carefully. As you can see, these papers present a diverse and challenging sampling of what I have been calling "Education and the New Scholarship on John Dewey." As the biographical notes on contributors at the end of this book indicate, this 5 174 JIM GARRISON is a collection written by an internationally distinguished group of philosophers. It is my hope as editor of this volume that these essays will convince the reader that the implications of Dewey's philosophy of education have not yet been exhausted. NOTE I Contained in the biographical notes for this collection are the titles of some of these authors' most influential works. 6 An Epistemological Foundation for Thinking: A Deweyan Approach JOHN J. HOLDER Assistant Professor of Philosophy. St. Norhert College, De Pere, Wisconsin I. INTRODUCTION With the proliferation of thinking skills programs and studies of cognition in the last two decades, it is clear that educators have come to recognize thinking as a primary goal of education. In an important sense, we are seeing the latent impact of John Dewey's How We Think, and Democracy and Education. Yet, despite this increasing focus on thinking, critically important problems in understanding the nature of thinking itself remain unresolved. Among the most philosophically significant problems in understanding the nature of thinking are critical deficien cies in the prevalent epistemology of thinking. The rise of cognitive science in the middle part of the twentieth century - much of it at odds with Dewey's understanding of cognition - has created a widely shared epistemological back ground in which the conception of thinking gives rise to important philosophical problems. These problems suggest the need for a thorough reconstruction of the epistemological basis of thinking. Such a reconstruction, I suggest, can best be developed by a reconsideration of Dewey's work on the issue and by extending Dewey's ideas in light of some of the recent theories in cognitive science that appear to carry forward, using the latest tools, some of the basic themes in Dewey's approach to thinking. In this essay, I want to focus on one particular issue regarding thinking that indicates the need for a deeper epistemological reconstruction. It is really a rather old issue: the problem of understanding thinking as both a rational and a creative process. Many programs designed to enhance thinking skills assume that the rational and creative aspects of thinking are easily married in the think ing process. I firmly agree that this is so, but such a marriage cannot be so easily achieved given the prevailing epistemological assumptions of many of these educational programs. Because thinking is typically cast as both a rational process idealized by information processing or formal logic and (at the same time) a creative process idealized by the imaginative inventiveness of the artist, it is not difficult to understand why thinking represents an epistemological puzzle. In these simple terms, the problem is quite obvious: the widely assumed epistemology of thinking characterizes rational and creative processes in tension with, if not in outright opposition to, one another, making unwarranted the view that such processes are intrinsically connected in a single process called think ing. While it would take a rather long survey to establish the extent of this 7 Studies in Philosophy and Education 13: 175-192, 1994/95. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Puhlishers.
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