The sage of discovery

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism - The Necessity of Experience

December 13, 1996

John Dewey, who died in 1952 at the age of 93, wrote for a vast audience in America, until within a year of his death. Besides books, he wrote in numerous newspapers and periodicals, giving his views on a wide range of subjects, political, educational and religious. For much of his life he was a professional academic, but his influence was that of a professional sage. Dewey satisfied a need. Americans at the turn of the century hankered for precisely the mixture of reality and idealism he gave them, the reality represented by his pragmatic insistence on experience as the source of meaning and knowledge, the idealism by the brand of Hegelianism he embraced at the beginning of his career, and by a high-mindedness resonating with the echoes of religion, but not any particular religion.

Immigrants from many European countries were coming to America at this time. They were determined to succeed as Americans and as democrats. The education of their children in their new country was of paramount importance, and it was Dewey's educational theories that perhaps most reassured them.But the combination of the idealistic with the practical and down-to-earth, whatever the subject matter, was a winner. Dewey almost never offended. Scientists, educationists, churchmen and the ordinary patriotic American all found something for them in what he wrote. But it must be said that this was achieved by a considerable degree of obfuscating vagueness.

His attitude to religion provides an example. He was brought up in an atmosphere of piety that he eventually found oppressive. Yet he continued to deploy the concepts of religion, delivering, as was expected of him, religious discourses to his students in his early days as a university teacher. As time passed, he ceased to be a member of any church and seemed gradually to have replaced a faith in God with a faith in people. The heaven to which one should aspire became a democratic heaven here on earth.

Alan Ryan, though admiring Dewey, and marvelling at the position he held in American thinking, does not attempt to deny the sloppiness and ambiguity of most of his writing. His book is divided into two parts. The first, an account of Dewey's life, is straightforward; the second, an analysis of at least some of his thoughts, must have been challenging, given the awfulness (that Ryan freely admits) of Dewey's prose style. From time to time Ryan seems to have caught the disease of impenetrability; but this may partly be explained by the fact that his book was very much written for Americans.

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There is another factor that calls for persistence on the part of the reader: often Ryan admits defeat. He confesses he has no way of knowing what Dewey really thought about a particular issue, or what he really felt. Faced with the question what was going on in Dewey's head or heart, he more than once hints that nothing much was. He was what he wrote. Now, a biographer is perfectly entitled to suggest there is nothing deeper in his subject than what appears. Thus, on Dewey's few surviving poems, Ryan writes: "In the light of (his) extreme evasiveness about his inner life, it is tempting to try to extract more, but I am not persuaded that much more is there." However, such remarks may drive readers to the conclusion that their subject is rather a dull man and a rather superficial thinker. And this in turn may raise the question whether it is worth the struggle to read about him. Perhaps, as the title of the book suggests, it is not the man or his thoughts but the phenomenon of Dewey that is interesting.

In this country, the phenomenon has appeared only in the field of education. Here Dewey's impact has been undeniable and, on the whole, disastrous. lt is therefore thoroughly worthwhile to analyse it. Dewey's philosophy of education mirrors his (nontechnical) pragmatism, or experimentalism as he preferred to call it, the reliance, that is, on experience as the source of learning, and his (nonacademic) idealism, the belief in democracy as the highest value.

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The classroom itself is where these principles must be displayed. The teacher becomes a super-gardener, whose aim is to allow all children to "grow". Instead of being exposed to teaching, a child must be exposed to experiences, for experiencing alone is learning. The formalisation of learning is not only inhibiting but politically divisive. Democracy of the shared classroom experience is the cradle of democracy in the grown-up world. Thus education will produce good politically respectable citizens, but will not be narrowly instrumental.

What Dewey brought to British primary education was not merely a fashion for so-called discovery methods and a horror of abstraction and formal teaching but a preference for the shared over the private, the community over the individual. Useful and understandable as this preference may have been for newly settled Americans, in different circumstances it seems to be linked to a deep philistinism and anti-intellectualism. Ryan makes this connection without insisting on it. Yet the more one reflects on it, the more dire the effects of Deweyism seem to be, spreading far beyond primary school.

Ryan tells us that he embarked on his work on Dewey because, having finished a book on Bertrand Russell's politics, and having moved from Oxford to Princeton, he found himself "puzzled by the way that Dewey and Russell agreed so often in politics and never in philosophy". Both had started as full-blown metaphysicians and had moved away. How was it that they were so far apart in their later output? He should not have been puzzled. Dewey was a true egalitarian, Russell, both literally and figuratively, an aristocratic armchair egalitarian. Both, it is true, were interested, though in different circumstances, in a roughly Rousseauesque manner of educating children. But intellectually and emotionally they were miles apart. Russell's philosophy, though in no way inhibited by the constraints of common sense or ordinary language, was sharp, analytic and full of a determination to carry an argument as far as it would go. Dewey, by contrast, though expert in seeing practical applications for his "experimental" philosophy, had an essentially soft, pliable, cotton-wool mind. They met, and Russell at one time expressed admiration for Dewey, but neither of them could have tolerated a genuine philosophical dialogue for long.

Ryan has done his best for Dewey, in a judicious fair-minded study. Edward Reed does not pretend to be fair or judicious. His book is a polemic. This makes it quite a good read. On the other hand, there is something depressing about reading a book, even quite a short one, where, after you have got the message on about page two, there are no further surprises or revelations. Philosophy, Reed believes, should have as its mission to help "ordinary folk" to understand their lives, and perhaps deepen them. Philosophy must therefore always be accessible to everyone and concerned with everyone's experience. The rot set in, he holds, with Plato, who thought that knowledge was for a few elevated people who could make contact with the ideal world of forms or essences.

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He consequently downgraded ordinary experience so that it became nothing but a shadow of a shadow of the real thing. Reed would think nothing of Bernard Williams's observation that the Greeks' legacy to western philosophy was philosophy. Yet, if one is supposed to think that Plato set the whole thing off on a fatally wrong course, it is hard to imagine which way philosophy ought to have gone, or indeed where it is supposed to have started. One can hardly think of the pre-Socratic philosophers, with their speculations about the nature and composition of the universe as addressing the concerns of ordinary folk. Going briskly through the centuries, Descartes emerges as the next sinner against philosophy, his individualistic separation of mind from body, and his placing of certain knowledge firmly within the province of the mind, giving, it seems, a further elitist twist to the disastrous story of the subject. At the end of this bizarre history, only the pragmatists are presented as properly philosophical. A psychologist called James J. Gibson, William James and Dewey are the only ones on the right lines.

Of course there is a thread of insight in this view of the matter. lt is perfectly true that Plato separated the truths of mathematics from the truths of experience, and struggled inconclusively to explain the nature of our knowledge of the ordinary world. lt is true that Descartes, in arguing for a total division of thinking from extended substance posed an insoluble problem, both about the connection between the two, and about the relation between our ideas of things and the things themselves. lt is true also that from Descartes until the present century philosophy was largely preoccupied with the attempt to find a solution to this Cartesian problem. What is eccentric about Reed's argument is his identification of a nondualistic philosophy with a philosophy that would elevate the lives of ordinary people, and tell them how to live. lt is somehow taken for granted that if one could only kick aside the tradition of Plato, Descartes and the rest, one would be in there with real people, discussing their experiences and teaching them how to profit by them in democratic harmony. One would, in short, be in one of Dewey's classrooms. There would be no radio or television, no computers and hardly any books in this idyllic scene. For knowledge gained from such sources is second-hand, not hands on, and it is only from experience, where the separation of mind from body is eliminated that it is possible to learn.

Reed is selective in his account of the war against Cartesianism, such is his determination to show that Dewey and the others were the first and only true believers in the reality of experience. He overlooks the work of the phenomenologists, in particular Husserl.

Reed recognises a surprising ally in Richard Rorty, among whose heroes Dewey stands, along with Wittgenstein and Heidegger. (Reed himself does not recognise the importance of Wittgenstein in the anti-Cartesian battle.) lt is hard to think of Dewey in that company, battling in his classroom with the jargon and despair of postmodernism whose prophet Rorty is.

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But it is unreasonable to criticise Reed's book as if it were primarily a history of ideas. lt is rather a passionate cry for a media-free utopia in which men are reunited with things and all people work together in a creative paradise, fulfilling themselves through contact with nature. lt is, as he plainly realises, for the ideal socialism of William Morris that he hankers, and the book ends with a paean of praise for Morris. Dewey himself, as Alan Ryan remarks, though sometimes speaking almost in the accents of Morris, cannot be wholly identified with this kind of essentially rustic socialism. Despite all his confusions, perhaps at heart he was too realistic; or he may simply have been too little interested in arts and crafts.

Baroness Warnock was mistress, Girton College, Cambridge, from 1985-91, and headmistress, Oxford High School, 1966-72.

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John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism

Author - Alan Ryan
ISBN - 0 393 037773 8
Publisher - Norton
Price - £19.95
Pages - 414

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