John Dewey
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John Dewey (1859-1952) was a United States philosopher and teacher who greatly influenced education in his country.
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Educational Philosophy
As can be seen in his Democracy and Education Dewey attempts to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the democratic educational philosophies of Rousseau and Plato. He saw Rousseau's as overemphasizing the individual and Plato's as overemphasizing the society. For Dewey, this distinction was by and large a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as communal process. However, as evidenced in his later Experience and Nature Dewey recognizes the importance of the subjective experience of individual people in introducing revolutionary new ideas.
For Dewey, it was vitally important that education not be the teaching of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students learned by integrated fully into their lives as citizens and human beings. At the Laboratory School which Dewey and his wife Alice ran at the University of Chicago, children learned much of their early chemistry, physics, and biology by investigating the natural processes which went into cooking breakfast--an activity they did in their classes. This practical element--learning by doing--sprang from his subscription to the philosophical school of Pragmatism. His lab school however performed so poorly that Dewey was forced to leave Chicago and his failing school in less than three years. He set up his famous Lincoln School in Manhattan where it too ultimately failed.
Dewey was essentially the foundational thinker of educational progressivism and an important progressive in general. His ideas, while quite popular, were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread. Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern in education was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for military purposes.
Deweyan Pragmatism
Dewey was a second-generation pragmatist, following Charles Sanders Pierce and William James. He was not nearly so pluralist or relativist as James. He held that value was a function not of whim nor purely of social construction, but a quality inherent in events; he also held, unlike James, that experimentation (social, cultural, technological, philosophical) could be used as a relatively hard-and-fast arbiter of truth. For example, James felt that for many people who lacked "over-belief" in religious concepts, human life was shallow and rather uninteresting. Dewey, in contrast, while honoring the important rule that religious institutions and practices played in human life, rejected belief in any static ideal, such as God. For Dewey, God was the method of intelligence in human life; that is to say, rigorous inquiry, or, very broadly configured, science. From the time of World War I onward, Dewey's thinking was strongly influenced by the work of F. Matthias Alexander.
Dewey has regained prominence recently in philosophy of education and in technical philosophy generally. Because of his process-oriented and sociologically conscious view of the world and knowledge, he is sometimes seen as a useful alternative to both modern and postmodern ways of thinking. Recent exponents like Richard Rorty have not always remained faithful to Dewey's original vision, but this itself is completely in keeping both with Dewey's usage of other thinkers and with his own philosophy--for Dewey, past doctrines always require reconstruction in order to remain useful for the present time.
Epistemology of transaction
Dewey's philosophy has gone by many names other than "pragmatism". He has been called an instrumentalist, and experimentalist, an empiricist, a functionalist, and a naturalist. The term "transactional" may better describe his views, a term emphasized by Dewey in his later years to describe his theories of knowledge and experience.
The terminology problem in the fields of epistomology and logic is partially due, according to Dewey and Bentley1, to, inefficient, and imprecise use of words, and concepts that reflect three historic levels of organization and presentation2. In the order of chronological appearance, these are :
- Self-Action: Prescientific concepts regarded humans, animals, and things as possessing powers of their own which initiated or caused their actions.
- Interaction: as described by Newton, where things, living and inorganic, are balanced against thing in a system of interaction, for example, the third law of motion that action and reaction are equal and opposite.
- Transaction: where modern systems of descriptions and naming are employed to deal with multiple aspects and phases of action without any attribution to ultimate, final, or independent entities, essences, or realities.
A series of characterizations of Transactions indicate the wide range of considerations involved.3
- Transaction is inquiry in which existing descriptions of events are accepted only as tentative and preliminary. New descriptions of the aspects and phases of events based on inquiry may be made at any time.
- Transaction is inquiry characterized by primary observation that may range across all subjectmatters that present themselves, and may proceed with freedom to re-determine and re-name the objects comprised in the system.
- Transaction is Fact such that no one of the constituents can be adequately specified as apart from the specification of all the other constituents of the full subject matter.
- Transaction develops and widens the phases of knowledge, and broadens the system within the limits of observation and report.
- Transaction regards the extension in time to be comparable to the extension in space, so that �thing� is in action, and �action� is observable in things.
- Transaction assumes no pre-knowledge of either organism or environment alone as adequate, but requires their primary acceptance in a common system.
- Transaction is the procedure which observes men talking and writing, using language and other representational activities to present their perceptions and manipulations. This permits a full treatment, descriptive and functional, of the whole process inclusive of all its contents, and with the newer techiques of inquiry required.
- Transactional Observation insists on the right to freely proceed to investigate any subjectmatter in whatever way seems appropriate, under reasonable hypothesis.
Illustration of differences between self-action, interaction, and transaction, as well as the different facets of transactional inquiry are provided by statements of positions that Dewey and Bentley definitely did not hold and which never should be read into their work.4
- They do not use any basic differentiation of subject vs. object; of soul vs body; of mind vs matter; or self vs nonself.
- They do not support the introduction of any ultimate knower from a different or superior realm to account for what is known.
- Similarly, they do not tolerate "entities" or "realities" of any kind intruding as if from behind or beyond the knowing-known events, with power to interfere.
- They exclude the introduction of "faculties" or other "operators" of an organism�s behaviors, and require for all investigations the direct observation and contemporaneous report of findings and results.
- Especially, they recognize no names that are offered as expressions of �inner� thoughts, nor of names that reflect compulsions by outer objects.
- They reject imaginary words and terms said to lie between the organism and its environmental objects, and require the direct location and source for all observations relevant to the investigation.
- They tolerate no meanings offered as "ultimate" truth or "absolute" knowledge.
- Since they are concerned with what is inquired into, and the process of knowings, they have no interest in any underpinning. Any statement that is or can be made about a knower, self, mind, or subject, or about a known thing, an object, or a cosmos must be made on the basis of, and in the language applicable to the specific investigation.
In summary, all of human knowledge consists of actions and products of acts in which men and women participate with other human beings, with animals and plants, as well as objects of all types, in any environment. Men and women have, are, and will present their acts of knowing and known in language. Generic man, and specific men and women are known to be vulnerable to error. Consequently, all knowledge (knowing and known) whether commonsensical or scientific; past, present, or future; is subject to further inquiry, examination, review, and revision. [edit]
References
- 1.Dewey,John and Bentley,Arthur. Knowing and the Known. Beacon Press, Boston. 149pp
- 2.ibid. p107-109
- 3.ibid. p121-139
- 4.ibid. p119-121
Further Reading
Secondary Sources Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club
External links
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "John_Dewey" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
