In response to:
Teacher of Teachers from the February 29, 1968 issue
To the Editors:
In the February 29 NYR, David Hawkins presents a noteworthy and well-intentioned review of John Dewey’s educational philosophy. In that review, Hawkins writes that “‘educational theory’ has dwindled to being a term with no significant meaning. If Dewey can help us, in theory or in practice, then these books ought to be widely re-read.” It is true enough that we have no significant meaning for “educational theory.” However, believing that Dewey can help us solve our problems in this area only compounds our difficulties. Whatever use (or abuse) Dewey’s educational writings might have had in the past, they are of regrettably small help today.
Dewey proposed a method that had justified itself in promoting remarkable industrial progress. Dewey assumed that if the method used in dealing with industrial problems was used for social problems, that social progress would certainly result. Therein resided his basic mistake. It was a mistake he made early as well as late in his career. Dewey’s educational program was based on a false assumption, and this assumption was never corrected—which means that it was never adequately tested, which means that Dewey did not apply the method he espoused to his own investigations. In a fundamental and damning way, Dewey was guilty of the very sin he continually argued against, as evidenced by his statement at the end of Experience and Education (1938). “The only ground I can see for even a temporary reaction against the standards, aims, and methods of the newer education is the failure of educators who professedly adopt them to be faithful to them in practice.” (p. 90)
Dewey was in error here on two critical counts. First, he seemed totally unaware that he had violated his own methodological principles. Secondly, he failed to countenance the questionable nature of the standards, aims, and methods that he was advocating. Encompassing both of these errors is Dewey’s fundamental error, not of being too far ahead of his time as Hawkins states, but of being too naïvely smug about the problems for which he was providing solutions. Hawkins stated that “Dewey was born before his times, but I am not sure when his times will come.” Nonsense—Dewey was a foremost product of his times and, for all of his educational concerns, he can be characterized by a naïveté that could be said to be characteristic of the progressive forces of his times. If he was at all relevant to the happenings around him, it was precisely because he was in touch with his times: he was willing to get involved. Fundamentally, as a philosopher, Dewey was a moral man. If Dewey failed as an educational philosopher, it was not a moral failure per se—not a failure to be involved with educational problems, but his failure was that of harboring a fundamental misconception about the solutions to the educational and social problems with which he was engaged.
Go back to Dewey’s three lectures (published as The School and Society) delivered in April 1899 before parents and others interested in the University Elementary School, and one sees the way Dewey was in touch with his times, was touched by the problems of his times and whose solutions were products of his times. Allow me to quote at some length:
I make no apology for not dwelling at length upon the social changes in question. Those I shall mention are writ so large that he who runs may read. The change that comes first to mind, the one that overshadows and even controls all others, is the industrial one—the application of science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized the forces of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale…. That this revolution should not affect education in other than formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.
Back of the factory system lies the household and neighborhood systems. Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most three generations, to find a time when the household was practically the center in which were carried on, or about which wer