Democracy and Education’s first chapter established that, properly understood, social life is an unceasing process of learning. Its second chapter, “Education as a Social Function,” situates this account of learning within a social context and specifies in greater detail the processes by which immature members of society are integrated into the purposes and practices of the community. In particular, Dewey is interested here in examining more closely the “conditions of growth” for the young if they are to become full-fledged coparticipants in social life. As he puts it, education is “a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process,” or a “shaping, forming, molding activity – that is, shaping into the standard form of social activity” found in a given community (MW 9: 14). As such, education happens according to communication, defined by Dewey as “a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession” (MW 9: 12). In this chapter, Dewey expands on these claims by inquiring into how communities transform their immature members from “uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals” (MW 9: 14).
Dewey’s relatively straightforward argument is essential for understanding how he views the place of the school in society, as well as the possibilities and limitations of educational reform. Put succinctly, after introducing his crucial notion of an environment as the medium in which and through which our habits and our very selves come to be, Dewey argues that insofar as humans associate with one another, they live in ineluctably social environments. This social environment is itself educative, but only in an unconscious fashion. The school is a special environment because it is the primary institution we have for deliberately and intelligently cultivating the young, and it can act as a stabilizing and unifying environment amidst the whirr of complex, modern society. In the course of expounding these claims, Dewey touches on a fascinating array of topics, including, among others, astute sociological observations about the historical development of education and a pragmatic theory of language that anticipates the later work of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although this chapter’s richness makes a short commentary difficult, elsewhere in Democracy and Education Dewey treats many of the topics it raises in greater detail. The following discussion is therefore confined to the chapter’s main points, and works sequentially through each of its four sections.
The Nature and Meaning of Environment
Dewey’s general answer to the question of how a society educates its young into mature members is that it does so “by means of the environment in calling out certain responses” (MW 9: 14). He defines environment as:
[…] the particular medium in which an individual exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain disposition of action.
Put another way, the environment fosters certain habits, an important term in Dewey’s work referring to our social-acquired dispositions, and which he treats in more detail in chapter 4 of DE.Footnote 1 Education is a process of living, and we do not live in a vacuum – rather, we inhabit an environment. Indeed, it might be better to say that our environment inhabits us, for the particular conditions of any person’s existence mold his or her character in so many ways. All other things being equal, for example, an animal raised in abusive circumstances will behave differently than one raised in nurturing ones. This is not to say that Dewey endorses the philosophical position known as determinism, according to which an environment necessarily produces certain habits – not only does such a perspective misunderstand the interactive or “transactional” conception of experience at the heart of Dewey’s worldview, it is also implausible: not every animal raised in abusive circumstances attacks when feeling threatened. Whether or not an animal does develop aggressive habits depends on the qualitatively unique combination of a particular environment and a particular animal’s conduct in relation to it. As Dewey puts it later in chapter 11, experience
includes an active and a passive element peculiarly combined. On the active hand, experience is trying—a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive, it is undergoing. When we experience something we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences.
Experience is accordingly an “active-passive affair” (MW 9: 147), a dynamic process in which organisms both shape and are shaped by their environments.
Dewey describes his understanding of the environment in several illuminating ways. First, he explains that it and the word “medium” “denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with [one’s] own active tendencies” (MW 9: 15). Here “continuity” – italicized by Dewey in the original – refers to the fact that the environment is not something that merely “encompasses” us without involving us. Instead, we are continuous with it: an environment fosters our “active tendencies” – our particular interests, habits, and skills, which themselves reciprocally foster the environment. The habit of watching football on television with family as a child, for example, might instill a habitual love of football, which then reinforces and reproduces the environment. At the same time, it does not necessarily obliterate the child’s individual agency, for one may choose to rankle one’s elders by rooting for a rival team, modify the inherited practice of watching in some manner (serving spanakopita instead of chips and salsa, say), or refuse it altogether. What is important to recognize is that we are both modified by and can modify our environments.
In the same paragraph, Dewey offers that “the things with which a man varies are his genuine environment” (MW 9: 15, emphasis in original). The pragmatic conviction in the primacy for practice is central. Life is “not bare passive existence […] but a way of acting” – we entertain aspirations, ideals, hopes, and fears, and thus life is, in a word, meaningful. What it means and how it is meaningful are functions of the environment. We “vary” by differentiating and distinguishing ourselves, by the active tendencies we bear idiosyncratically, by our particular and individual modes of growth. Thus any person’s “genuine” environment is that which enables and enacts their active tendencies, those aspects of their world that become features of concern (a term Dewey italicizes). In Dewey’s examples, an astronomer’s environment consists of the stars and his telescope, and a historian’s environment includes his research tools and the ancient period he studies. Both characters, of course, inhabit complex and dynamic worlds – they eat food, listen to music, and have friendships – yet the environments that make them distinctive beings are narrower, defined according to their idiosyncratic concerns and interests.
Dewey therefore comes to his summary definition of “environment”: “those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being” (MW 9: 15). The italicized characteristic should be taken in literally, for he means those activities that form one’s character, one’s self. While there is more to be said on the self soon, it is worth noting Dewey’s definition of character as “the interpenetration of habits” (MW 14: 29) in light of this explication of “environment.” The environment is the medium in which and through which our habits form.
The Social Environment
Dewey further specifies that the human environment is ineluctably social. In his words,
What [a person] does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals and condemnations of others. A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally.
Of course, a hermit lives in an environment, but it is not a social environment – and hermits are not bound by the social norms – even when they gallivant nude in the open, they are not doing so in public.Footnote 2 Dewey’s own example concerns a businessman: to deny the social environment is tantamount to holding that he can do business, “buying and selling, all by himself” (MW 9: 16). Like tango, it takes two to exchange.Footnote 3 Dewey’s point is not just the relatively banal one that certain social environments make certain activities (like business) possible. More significantly, Dewey holds that our very conception of our selves is a function of our immersion in society: who I am is a result of my socialization in a particular environment. In Dewey’s account, this is because one’s personal character is one’s congeries of habits, and habits are engendered by one’s formation in a social context. This ecological or “transactional” conception of the self has a long history in philosophy and letters – Aristotle, in Politics, famously described humans as political, or inherently social, animals (1337/1984, 1253a1–3), and Tennyson wrote that “I am a part of all that I have met” (Tennyson Reference Tennyson and Rick1950, 49). The social self, moreover, is central to classical pragmatism. In his 1890 Principles of Psychology, William James (Reference James1950) explained that we have as many selves as we have social contexts, and Dewey’s Chicago colleague George Herbert Mead argued that “what goes to make up the organized self is the organization of the attitudes which are common to the group. A person is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the institutions of that community into his own conduct” (Mead Reference Mead1967, 162).
How does one then structure an environment to call forth certain habitual responses? This question is particularly important for school leaders and teachers in thinking about how to transform schools and classrooms into genuinely educative environments. Dewey answers by distinguishing between training and educative teaching. Training involves shaping external habits of action, whereas educative teaching emphasizes the “mental and emotional dispositions of behavior” (MW 9: 16). For the most part, animals are trained: “food, bits and bridles, noises, vehicles are used to direct the ways in which the natural or instinctive response of horses occur,” for example. While humans can indeed be trained in a similar fashion – Dewey uses the example of parents teaching a child to avoid a toy by arranging conditions “so that every time a child touched a certain toy he got burned” (MW 9: 16)Footnote 4 – the aim of education in his sense should be to create “copartners” who would “in engaging in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions” (MW 9: 17). The line between training and educative teaching is not sharp, and merely shaping external habits can indeed sometimes result in a corresponding transformation of mental dispositions: a reluctant child forced to practice piano may ultimately embrace a life as a concert soloist, even if such occurrences are considerably rarer than many parents imagine. Training can routinize behavior, but it does so without involving the trainee in the meaning of the activity. As Dewey writes at the conclusion of this subsection, when an individual acts as a trained animal, in response to a certain stimulus, be it a whip or a word, “the person forming the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he realizes the meaning of what he does” (MW 9: 20). Put otherwise, knowledge is not something simply imparted from a teacher to a student, passed on like a possession. Rather, genuine learning is induced by creating an environment in which students participate meaningfully in a shared activity. As such, any association between humans – any social environment, that is, is potentially educative. How such associations become genuinely and deliberately educative are the focus of Dewey’s next section.
These considerations bring Dewey to a basic statement of the relationship between the self and the social environment:
… the social medium neither implants certain desires and ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular habits of action, like ‘instinctively’ winking or dodging a blow. Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting is the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing step.
The Social Medium as Educative
The focus narrows further in this third section, where Dewey notes several ways the social environment exerts “an educative or formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set purpose” (MW 9: 20). In broad strokes, this happens because “the way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory” (MW 9: 21). Such a statement is characteristic of Dewey’s transactional understanding of truth, wherein ideas must be understood in relation to concrete practice. Ancient Mesopotamians would not have been able to fathom avionics or Christology, for example, for “their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their mind riveted to other things” (MW 9: 21). Likewise, most contemporary Americans would find it practically impossible to embrace the divine right of kings.Footnote 5 While the influence of the environment “is so subtle and pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind” (MW 9: 21), the process of shaping the self occurs in many registers.
Dewey offers language, manners, and aesthetic taste as three examples of activities through which the young are unconsciously socialized into community life, for each of them embodies those central “habitudes which lie below the level of reflection” yet “which have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others” (MW 9: 22). This list is not meant to be exhaustive, only illustrative, and elsewhere in his writings Dewey describes other relevant channels of habituation, including political and legal institutions, science and technology, morality, the economy and literature, as well as the various groupings in which we come to awareness of our selves, from family, clan, and people to sect, faction, and class (LW 13: 72–5). The social environment influences us in myriad ways, and the particular contours of its workings are only determinable in concrete situations.
Educative teaching must therefore be understood in its proper context. Before the advent of formal schooling, participation in the social environment was the primary and often only means by which the young were reared into mature members of the community. Today, Dewey writes, it still “furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled youth” (MW 9: 21). The social environment is with us all the time, while schools only hold students for a fraction of the day, and years before students begin schooling they have already been shaped by their environing conditions. With this caveat, Dewey offers that
What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning.
Dewey perhaps deflates the pretensions of educators everywhere, yet in doing so he sharpens the focus on the tools we do have for reform. Schooling may not seem like much against the influence of the social environment, yet if done properly it can prepare the young with some tools for making sense of their engagements with the world.
The School as a Special Environment
The school is “special” because it provides a controlled educative environment, in contrast to the “willy-nilly” and unconscious processes of learning in ambient social associations (MW 9: 22). As he puts it, schools are “the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members” (MW 9: 23). Schools perform three particular functions that differentiate them from other associations of life. First, they provide a simplified environment for comprehending the overwhelming array of the world. Such a simplified environment “selects the features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young,” and then progresses, “using the factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more complicated” (MW 9: 24). The second function Dewey ascribes to schools is the provision of a “purified medium of action” (MW 9: 24). School environments are controlled to screen out undesirable influences on mental habits. The “dead wood from the past” as well as “what is positively perverse” alike can be omitted from them (MW 9: 24). Society has a responsibility “not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society” (MW 9: 24). The final function of the school environment is “to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment” (MW 9: 24–5).
Social complexity is marked for Dewey in large part by the profusion of formative associations; for this reason, he writes that the nouns “society” and “community” are misleading insofar as they suggest single things. Rather, “a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected” (MW 9: 25), and indeed in a more complex manner than in any earlier epoch of human history.Footnote 6 Each of these associations, furthermore, provides an educative environment. This profusion of unconsciously educative environments adds to the urgency of schooling, lest social entropy result: an educational institution “which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced environment for the young” is necessary (MW 9: 25). The school, accordingly, affords the opportunity to establish community despite the centrifugal forces of modern society. It has “assimilative force” – not in making everyone the same, but in letting them grow in a common association – “the intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment” (MW 9: 26). It does so, on the one hand, by providing a common subject matter, which “accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated” (MW 9: 26). On the other hand, this orientation toward a common world, so to speak, is complimented by what we might term the consolidation of the self. The multitude of associations threatens not only the integrity of our common world, but also the integrity of the individual. Accordingly, the school also has the function of “coordinating within the disposition of the individual the diverse influences of the various social elements into which he enters” (MW 9: 26). In sum, the school provides a site for the interpretation and negotiation of the competing unconscious formative influences of the society at large.
