John Dewey’s conception of thinking – the cyclical process of becoming interested, observing, weighing the consequences of possible actions, and testing ideas that underlie those actions – is a central element in his psychology and his educational philosophy before, in, and after the publication of Democracy and Education. Applying his analysis of thinking in chapter 11, he argues in chapter 12 that the development of students’ ability to think, in all subjects and dimensions of life, is the central aim of education. As we view the current U.S. educational context, Dewey’s position is as relevant now as it was in any decade of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on the pivotal role that “problems” play in thinking – in Dewey’s view and in current U.S. policy and practice. We also discuss the important role that Dewey attributes to thinking in supporting active civic participation.
“Thinking in Education” occupies a pivotal position in Democracy and Education. Along with chapter 11, “Experience and Thinking,” it summarizes the main tenets of Dewey’s psychology of experience and, within experience, of thinking. Those constructs, “experience” and “thinking,” are the basis of his ideas and plans for education. In prior chapters, Dewey describes the nature and purpose of education in a democratic society – for young people and the communities they will join. In subsequent chapters he traces the consequences of making thinking and the enrichment of experience central educational goals. Chapters 11 and 12 bridge these two sections of the book; they are the intellectual heart of Democracy and Education.
Dewey’s concepts of “experience” and “thinking” are, on the one hand, familiar and obvious (and so easily accepted) and on the other, abstract and elusive. Such is the nature of John Dewey’s writing on education – both intuitively appealing and challenging. We will not remove that challenge completely; as Dewey himself argues, grappling with his ideas is essential to learning. But we hope to shed light on how those ideas, particularly his view of thinking, depart from common assumptions about how schooling should be organized. We also aim to question why, as he did, education cannot be more engaging and productive for more students.
Dewey’s View on “Thinking” and Its Centrality to Education
In the opening section of chapter 12 entitled “The Essential of Method,” Dewey signals that his educational approach would not pursue a more familiar goal – that students should master the accepted body of knowledge and skills that others consider essential for successful adult lives outside of school. In place of mastery, Dewey argues for the centrality of thinking: “The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists of centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking” (MW 9: 159).
To grasp Dewey’s objective, we have to see how the mastery of knowledge, skill, and the “training of thinking” are not the “thinking” that he has in mind – that is, how the focus on “thinking” departs from a mastery focus. Dewey argues that a focus on mastery of pre-selected content is destined to stifle the development of students’ ability to think. But this may be a confusing stance for many readers. Isn’t learning important knowledge and skills the same process as thinking? Not necessarily. Where some form of cognitive activity is required to master any organized body of content, Dewey wanted a particular form of thinking in school classrooms. That form of thinking placed students and their interests, curiosities, and ideas at center stage, not the accepted wisdom of the ages. Grasping the difference between the mastery view and Dewey’s view of thinking helps us to appreciate why his ideas “raised the bar” on the educators of his time and continue to do so today.
Before we review Dewey’s analysis of thinking, it is only fair to acknowledge the kinds of obstacles that he sometimes presents to his readers. Immediately following the sentence we have quoted above, Dewey adds, with emphasis,
Thinking is the method of intelligent learning, or learning that employs and rewards mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it takes.
In three consecutive sentences, “method” appeared five times, but with subtle shifts in meaning. Because this is an important passage, we offer our sense of his multiple meanings. In the sentence quoted earlier, “method” refers to how education is organized and carried out; “pedagogy” is a reasonable synonym. However, in this passage, thinking is the “method” of learning because it, not the mastery of content, changes our experience of ourselves, others, and the world. In that sense, “thinking is method” because it is how we carry out intelligent interactions with the world.
In chapter 11 of DE, Dewey presents a view of thinking that begins in situations where people have experiences that are unclear, interesting, or puzzling. The terms “situation” and “experience,” as important to Dewey’s view of thinking as they are, can also be challenging to understand. Dewey uses “situation” to refer to the physical, social, and psychological settings in which human experience happens. Elsewhere (e.g., in Experience and Education, LW 13), he calls these the objective and internal conditions of experience. The objective conditions are the physical and social contexts in which experience takes place; the internal conditions are the elements of the person’s psychological state that shape the experience. For example, in a social gathering at a friend’s home the physical attributes of the home and the other people who attend (the objective conditions) as well as the person’s state of mind (internal conditions) all influence her experience during the event. The concept of “experience” is even more central to Dewey’s philosophy and educational psychology. In chapter 11, he proposes that all human experience involves an active “trying” or “doing” element and a more passive element of “undergoing” (MW 9: 146–7). Experience, for Dewey, requires agency: We act in some way and then undergo the consequences of our action. Experience is meaningful and “fruitful” for thinking when we attend to the connection between actions and their consequences. When we do, learning is much more likely. When we act without attention to consequences, Dewey argues that such “experience” really isn’t experience in the sense he intends. It is fleeting, it carries little significance, and it is unlikely to support growth.
On that foundation, Dewey argues in chapter 12 that the central weakness of most educational programs was that they did not center in and flow from students’ experience, but rested on the residue of other people’s experience – including others long dead. Mastery views of education ask students to enter into the experience of others once that experience has been distilled into accepted forms of knowledge. So early explorers had genuine experience of the terrain they explored, but the school subject of “geography” is the distilled and abstracted summary of their experience (MW 2).
Dewey emphasizes that schooling should provide students with experiences that approximate that of explorers rather than asking them to memorize the contents of other people’s maps. Schooling’s departure and isolation from students’ experience was its most crucial mistake. Students’ experience outside of school was rich, exploratory, and thought-provoking. He was committed to the position that the same could be true for experience in school if (a) the organization of schooling supplied situations with appropriate objective conditions, (b) teachers attended to and took seriously what students noticed and explored in those situations, and (c) classroom work took up and extended that experience. In his view, schooling in the early twentieth century rarely satisfied these conditions.
When condition (a) is fulfilled, thinking in classrooms becomes possible. When situations are sufficiently rich, problems naturally arise in students’ experience when they act in those situations. If students cannot act on the material and social components of their classroom situation (e.g., if their activity involves completing worksheets at their desks), their curiosity will not likely be engaged, and they will be cut off from the interesting or uncertain results that arise from their actions. Those interesting, unexpected, and confusing results of actions become problems that students are motivated to resolve because they are “problematic.” Here Dewey distinguishes between situations that are uncertain but provoke no further attention and those that are problematic because the person in the situations begins to ponder potential actions to explore what is unclear or puzzling. Like “situation” and “experience,” “problem” is central to Dewey’s view of thinking. Problems are personally meaningful open questions, situated in students’ everyday experience – not in pre-existing curricula. Their puzzling nature draws students to consider possible courses of action to explore, and for Dewey, “acting” in the situation is essential. Genuine “solutions” typically involve multiple rounds of acting, observing the consequences of actions, and evaluating progress. For this reason, many scholars have interpreted Dewey as arguing for “projects” in education.
In the face of problems, we are engaged without knowing exactly what to do. As a result, we have a much greater stake in figuring out what to do than we would with typical school tasks, which are defined and presented from outside our experience. We do not want to walk away from our problem, in part, because we have ideas about what might be going on or what might work to resolve it. Dewey emphasizes that if we act on first impulse we are not yet thinking (LW 8). Thinking really begins when we stop, generate, and weigh different options for action. Good educational situations are those that make it likely that students will find problems that are neither trivial nor overwhelmingly difficult. As Dewey put it,
A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
Those “luminous familiar spots” are points of contact with students’ prior experience; they generate ideas for exploration in action. The tentative nature of ideas means that problem solvers, young and adult alike, are unsure what the consequences of their actions in the situation will be. Ideas are conjectures worthy of testing; only when we act do we gain any new information about the value or insight they provide. Our observation and interpretation of the results of our actions in turn lead to reflection and judgment about the initial idea, alternative ideas, and possibilities for subsequent action. Since every action taken to explore a problem leads to enriched objective and internal conditions, students and their teachers need to remain with a problem for an extended period of time (at least multiple days) for thinking to run a productive course. Reflection and reconsideration upon actions take time.
In other writings on education (e.g., Experience and Education), Dewey links the idea-action-judgment of results cycle to the scientific method. But he did not use that term to mean only the conduct of professional science. The English word “science” actually came from Latin and French words that referred generally to all knowledge, and our English word once carried this meaning as well. In that spirit Dewey uses the term “scientific method” to characterize productive or “reflective” thinking more generally (MW 9: 147); when properly taught, it characterized thinking in all occupations and school subjects. When Dewey states early in this chapter that “thinking is method,” he means thinking in a manner consistent with the scientific method.
As with “thinking,” it would be relatively easy to accept Dewey’s focus on “problems” but see that schools have always regularly posed problems and students have always been thinking when they solved them. After all, isn’t it typical for teachers to say things like, “today, we are going to work on this problem”? Dewey clearly indicates that some would indeed read him that way, but that was not his intent and message (MW 9: 156). Problems, in his view, must arise from students’ experience; they cannot be chosen in advance by others, no matter how important or accessible they may seem. They must issue from students’ experience and what they find “problematic” – engaging and puzzling – in their experience of the present situation. Similarly, no idea can be passed from one person to another, because “[w]hen it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea” (MW 9: 159). Students’ ideas must arise from their experience of what they find “problematic” in situations, and for each, those ideas will arise from “luminous familiar spots” in their prior experience.
Although we have focused thus far on the role of thinking in education, Dewey also emphasizes that thinking had important implications for democracy. As students exercise their agency in thinking – by identifying what is problematic and worthy of exploration and study – they develop personal agency that supports greater autonomy in all their engagements with others. Agency and autonomy, for Dewey, are inherently social processes. Thinking prepares students to contribute to a broader social community as full participants and peers, rather than as subjects dominated by others.
In How We Think (LW 8), Dewey argues that as thinking matures, thinkers shift from a dependence on authority to a willingness to question, reconsider, and ultimately accept or reject the propositions accepted as true in the wider society. In Democracy and Education, Dewey focuses on the importance of autonomy – and its relation to thinking – in civic participation. Early in chapter 12, he warns that “skill obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used” (MW 9: 152). The inability to think independently
leaves a man [i.e., an adult member of a democratic society, not a child in school] at the mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement.
So for Dewey, thinking is not only the central organizing principle of education; it is also the central capacity that students must exercise in asserting their rights and carrying out their responsibilities as full citizens in a democratic society.
Thinking and Problems in Contemporary Education
To review, Dewey argues that students’ thinking about what is experientially problematic can and should take place in school classrooms. Problems must flow from students’ experience and be “owned” by them; they cannot be “assigned.” Teachers can support students’ thinking by creating the situations in classrooms, especially their objective conditions, which are rich in potential problems. In contrast to typical views of “discovery learning,” teachers should not sit idly by, leaving students to their own ideas. They need to engage and support the students’ thinking and inquiry without taking over. Students investigate what they find problematic with ideas that spontaneously arise as possible explanations, and acting upon those ideas generates results that students consider and weigh over time to resolve what was initially problematic. The development of the ability to think prepares students for full lives as adults, in all occupations and in the broader social and political life of their communities.
We find that Dewey’s proposal for thinking in schooling illuminates important tensions in current educational policy and practice – especially with respect to the goals of education. For example, those who argue for the importance of “21st Century Skills” are, somewhat ironically, restating important elements of Dewey’s proposals from the early twentieth century. These advocates seem less interested in the mastery of content (knowledge and skills) and are more concerned with students’ capacity to grapple with “real problems” in collaboration with peers – as the capacity to do so will largely determine “success” in the rapidly changing, global economy. Their arguments clearly indicate they mean problems in Dewey’s sense, not routine tasks that can be practiced and mastered. These proponents rightly worry that typical schooling practice does not provide students with sufficient experience and the supporting dispositions to cope with “real” problems. But if educators have embraced the notion of “21st Century Skills,” they have not yet taken seriously what deep changes in classroom practice – curriculum, teaching, and assessment – would be required to develop them.
In the subject area of mathematics, current policies that orient teaching in K-12 classrooms reflect the continuing debate and tension between content mastery and Dewey’s focus on problems and thinking. On the one hand, The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) devote great attention and detail to stating content objectives for what teachers will teach and students will learn in kindergarten through Grade 8 and in high school (NGACBP 2010). That these lists fill up virtually the entire document reflects the continuing emphasis on the mastery view of thinking – that is, on the acquisition of pre-defined and pre-specified knowledge and skill. However, three pages are devoted to articulating eight “mathematical practices” that should, the document argues, characterize activity in all school mathematics. The first practice states, “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.” The short descriptive paragraph that follows provides a discussion of problems and problem solving that is surprisingly consistent with Dewey’s view. It focuses, for example, on actions that can be taken to gain a better sense of what is going on in the problem. The activities of making sense and persevering as key orientations to “problems” also closely align with Dewey’s view. But these problems are not the mathematical tasks that students typically experience in school. Those tasks are not “problematic”: They have been framed by others and can be solved relatively easily. Both curriculum and teaching are typically organized so that students know what to do to solve mathematical tasks before they are assigned. Indeed, whatever practices the CCSSM may endorse, standard instruction is organized so that problems in Dewey’s sense simply do not arise.
Similarly, the fourth practice states, “Model with mathematics.” The CCSSM characterize “modeling” as the process of translating interesting situations that arise in everyday experience into problems that can be solved with mathematical methods. It employs the term “situation” just as Dewey understood it. “Problems” (in the first practice) arise from “situations” when students find purpose in formulating and working to solve them. The work of modeling is to translate the most important aspects of the “situation” into elements of “problems” that can be solved using mathematical tools. The ill-formed (from a mathematical perspective) and indeterminate nature of such situations align very closely with Dewey’s analysis of “situations” and the “problems” that issue from them. But for many reasons, mathematical modeling is hard work, so it is no surprise that most textbooks and teachers have avoided modeling and focused on mastery of content. Serious attention to modeling would require major changes in the design of curriculum materials, teacher education, and teacher professional development.
In most U.S. mathematics classrooms, little time is devoted either to problems or modeling. Of course, “problem” is widely used in discussions of mathematics teaching, but the word almost always means “task” or “exercise.” The goal of these exercises is mastery – to fix the solution methods and the tasks they solve permanently in the minds of students. Any substantial attention to problems, problem solving, and modeling would require a very serious reconstruction of typical classroom instruction. Instead, textbooks continue to present exercises and matched procedures, and teachers sensibly understand their task to be one of supporting students’ mastery of content.
The Common Core era in school mathematics does not yet represent a serious effort to apply Dewey’s ideas about thinking to what happens in classrooms on a daily basis. The document itself embraces both mastery and thinking views of education, but with much more attention given to the former. The presence of the practice standards in the CCSSM and the calls for efforts to teach “21st Century Skills” both express our national worries about the sufficiency of the mastery view. The growth and availability of digital technology that makes so much knowledge continuously available to students and adults only compounds these worries.
The current national focus in the United States on stating and achieving worthy and rigorous standards is also generally silent on the connections that Dewey emphasizes between thinking and democratic participation. The focus on college – and workplace – readiness in the Common Core standards documents suggests that the primary purpose of education is utilitarian: Students should master the standards so that they are positioned to achieve greater economic success in knowledge-based work. With the focus on students’ “technical” abilities, little attention is given to life outside of work. That civic and democratic rights and responsibilities receive no explicit mention in the CCSSM and only brief attention in the accompanying standards for English Language Arts and Literacy does not bode well for students’ future participation in the social and political activities of the communities they will enter as adults (NGACBP 2010). Thinking, problem solving, and modeling are tools for more effective and engaged civic participation. Although the Common Core standards may prepare students for success in their future workplaces, the value of that success is understood in terms of their contribution to the economic vitality of the community and the nation, not their autonomous participation in a democratic society – an educational “outcome” that Dewey valued highly.
Closing
The reader who feels drawn to the image of school learning that involves extended cycles of thinking that send students home wondering, questioning, and exploring on their own may find this chapter discouraging. Why have such worthy ideas, expressed a hundred years ago, had such little impact on schooling? Does the absence of wide-scale efforts to organize education around thinking suggest that Dewey’s ideas, admirable as they may be, are too simply idealistic or vague to be taken seriously? Both questions have merit for anyone inspired by Dewey’s ideas.Footnote 1 Our view is that compelling educational ideas cannot be dismissed because they are “idealistic” or ask too much of educators and school systems. If they express worthy goals, they should remain in the center of our thinking as we work to reshape educational systems to address them more seriously and productively. In short, they have enduring value as goals and premises for progress.
