In the first two chapters of Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that education, and the schools, should provide an environment where social interaction can flourish. He believes one of the functions of schools is to provide the type of environment that will offer further direction: “We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment” (MW 9: 23). In chapter 3, Dewey develops the idea of direction as fundamental to education, and underscores the profoundly social and useful aspects of education. For him, being educated leads somewhere, and that desired end or consummation is not something merely idle or decorative.
The key concept in this chapter shows how direction can give form and structure to experience. Dewey draws an important distinction between external direction and internal direction. One of the chief functions of education is to provide a direction, a shape, a form to activity that would otherwise be formless and without a conceived end. As living organisms, humans are always alive and reacting. One needs focus, to bring attention to a goal or end, and order, so that one can move on to other activities with direction. Control and direction are shaped within an environment that includes the interaction of the agent and her setting. Control and direction are meaningless taken outside this organic fluidity. So what Dewey does in this chapter is discuss ways that direction, as focus and order, can give form to activity.
Dewey is perhaps too sanguine about the execution of such direction when he notes that “[t]o some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to do” (MW 9: 29). This can certainly be done with finesse, and that is what he gets at later in the chapter. Direction abstracts from a larger situation, full of sidebar activities and energies, the more so as the child is younger. Learning focus is a supreme educational achievement and must be done carefully so as not to squelch creativity, nor blunt one’s attentiveness to the environment.
Dewey draws two important conclusions about direction: One, “purely external direction is impossible” (MW 9: 30), because there has to be something that reacts to, that interplays, with the direction. One cannot direct a loaf of bread or a stick of wood. They won’t respond. There has to be something that responds to the stimuli of the environment. An organism is already doing something, and as Dewey states simply, “all direction is but re-direction” (MW 9: 30, emphasis in original).
His second conclusion follows from the first, in that one who externally directs can never see the consequences of this direction, or as Dewey states, “the control afforded by the customs and regulations of others may be short-sighted” (MW 9: 30). Thus education should provide a sense of cognitive independence, whereby there is constant checking against the environment, one’s own thoughts, as well as those of a mentor or guide, to evaluate progress toward an end. One can be thrown off course by a short-sighted bit of guidance, which may work immediately, but will cause the person to not appreciate what comes down the avenue toward her.
Dewey gives good advice regarding direction to those responsible for the care and nurturing of others: “Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct” (MW 9: 31). In teaching, constant monitoring of those you teach so as to notice how each individual responds to a lesson is required. One can be caught up in the needs of learning a particular lesson that one does not see how what is learned connects to a larger learning goal, such as an educated citizen in a democracy. Such individual attention is impossible to do of course unless one tutors one-on-one, and even then requires a great deal of attentiveness that many teachers are unable to muster. So Dewey is here just giving caution to some of the inevitabilities of life that result from less than ideal instances but realistic and quotidian human interaction.
Modes of Social Direction
Dewey shows how what he terms “modes of social direction” operate in different ways that are not as deliberate and manifest as explicit direction or guidance (MW 9: 26). Here Dewey draws the distinction between physical results and educative results, where direction and guidance become mental and internalized, and thus properly educational. A simple example suffices: A child can be snatched from a fire or yelled at to stay away from the dangerous flame and heat. Neither is necessarily internalized because the child has not had the opportunity to interact, and to make the action her own: “When we confuse a physical result with an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person’s own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way” (MW 9: 32). Dewey seems to admonish us to only use coercive or even conscious control mechanisms in an emergency, because otherwise a learning opportunity for self-direction and growth is eliminated.
These methods of conscious form of control contrast to the social milieu in which persons interact with their environment, especially the instruments they use to achieve ends that Dewey discusses in chapter 2 of DE. Within this social milieu are many forms of control that are not explicit as a barked order or a snatch from a fire, but which nonetheless form part of the environment of the daughter growing up in a household, such as what expectations the mother, siblings, father, and others have for her, and how she as a daughter interprets and mediates these expectations. So much of the learning occurs in situ, in the moment, in imitation, and following a lead in a social unit like a family. As Dewey notes in the summary for chapter 2, this social milieu is “truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity” (MW 9: 26).
For Dewey, central in such learning and social development is the place of things, of objects in the natural or built environment. Here he breaks from the psychology of his time that relied on mental impressions. One would have thought this empiricism had been discarded long before Dewey, as Immanuel Kant had made a thoroughgoing critique of such simple mechanical sense perception, yet simply attributing learning to sensory impression was still discussed seriously in Dewey’s time. Dewey conceived of learning occurring in a transactional environment of organism and environment. That transaction includes bodily sensation, mental constructs, and cognitive function. Dewey does not rely on such an abstracted environment to build his cognitive theory. Humans do not simply interact with colors or shapes, but with natural and built objects of the environment, or as Dewey simply puts it, the “use of things” (MW 9: 33, emphasis in original). Meaning is not determined by observation of primary and secondary qualities, but by the use to which an item is put because of those qualities. A simple example suffices: A ball-peen hammer is devised to do a specific task, and thus I can understand what this hammer is by interpreting its qualities and comparing it to other tools. We behave consciously, mentally, and with meaning when we more fully understand a situation, beyond the bare recognition of qualities. And this is important for the schema Dewey is constructing: We control that which we understand, we do not control that which we do not understand or grant meaning. Take one of his examples, a thunderclap. We jump at the loud noise, but only when we understand it to be a thunderclap, and not a bullet going by our ears, do we react appropriately.
This attribution of meaning becomes all the more important in social activities. We must share in a common meaning and a common purpose in order for an activity to be social. Those who are part of a social situation are aware of what others are doing and modify their own actions toward an intelligent, social end. For Dewey, that highest end is to be socially directed and fully participative in a democratic way of life. Dewey here seems particularly aware of non-verbal language, in the use of the bodily signs to signify how one behaves in a social environment. We frown to express disapproval or disappointment, and others recognize the downward turn of the mouth to signify this, but only because they are thus interested to notice this. It does not come into their range of vision and meaning attribution unless we pay it attention and connect it to the social situation at hand. This requires a sophistication that could be more difficult for some than for others. Consider learners with high-functioning autism such as Asperger’s Syndrome. Some individuals with this diagnosis are disconnected not only from aspects of the social fabric that would inform them of the meaning of a particular frown at a particular time, but also from some aspects of the physical environment linked to the social milieu.Footnote 1 They may not recognize facial expression, and in cases of severe disability, may not even understand the “background of coarser and more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results,” as Dewey refers to it (MW 9: 37). Dewey does not indicate anywhere in this chapter that he is taking into account exceptionalities such as high-functioning autism. Dewey does address the need to tailor instruction for one’s capabilities and to recognize limitations for what they are in chapter 6 (MW 9: 80).
As Dewey notes, “The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control” (MW 9: 37–8). That is why learning always occurs in the middle of things; there never is learning ex nihilo for Dewey. Humans are born in an environment of natural and built objects all of which are controlled or at least understood in some fashion. Children already possess minds that “are the organized habits of intelligent response” (MW 9: 38) developed in constant practice with things with which they interact and how they observe others using these things, as well as language used as a “joint reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation” (MW 9: 37).
This concretized use and understanding of things in the environment make up mind for Dewey. Mind is not simply an assemblage of faculties of perception and attendant cognition, but extends out into the environment with which it interacts. And since we are born into a society, we are already interacting in a social manner and thus mind itself has to be social. For Dewey it makes no sense to talk of a mind being abstracted from its environment, but that is precisely what happens in cases of mental pathology. So while Dewey is creating a psychology of wellbeing to support democracy, he is also showing indirectly and perhaps unintentionally the limits of capabilities and sanity.
On Imitation
Dewey goes on to note, in section 3, “Imitation and Social Psychology,” how imitation, if used as an educational strategy, cannot achieve the goal of internal, social direction that Dewey considers important and that he develops in this chapter. First, Dewey sees that imitation can simply be a common reaction to a phenomenon, and not something learned: “A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli” (MW 9: 39). Second, it is likely that a social group will have common features and behaviors. Does that mean one individual imitates another? In one sense, of course it does, and in this sense imitation is no more interesting or explanatory than saying “opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power” (MW 9: 39). It is the norms and practices of the group that determine one’s action from within those norms and practices, and should you not practice these, you are, as Dewey notes, “literally out of it” (MW 9: 40) as such norms and practices are so strong in determining behavior.
These norms and practices are powerful because humans want to be part of the process, part of the game. Dewey’s ordinary example of a child playing ball illustrates that the child imitates the movements of the game because she wants to be part of the joy of that particular experience. The end is enjoyment, whether it be as a consummate experience, a task completed, or a contest competed for and won. Those are the ends that inform the activity. And it is the imitation of “the means of accomplishment” that give this satisfaction.
Problems in the Text
To complete the chapter, Dewey turns to a discussion of applications for education. With no context for his remarks, he discusses what he terms savagery and civilization. To be charitable, he situates this discussion within his contextualized theory of mind, but it is still an odd excursus. No evidence is proffered for “backward institutions” or “primitive social customs” (MW 9: 41–2). His theory of intelligence in use falters here because it does not allow him to see any alternative:
Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends.
Such a discussion is wholly one-sided and myopic, as Claude Lévi-Strauss notes in The Savage Mind:
Every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent. When we make the mistake of thinking that the Savage is governed solely by organic or economic needs, we forget that he levels the same reproach at us, and that to him his own desires for knowledge seems more balanced than ours.
Dewey’s discussion of savagery in this chapter is all the more arresting because recent scholarship has shown connections between the development of pragmatism and indigenous ways of knowing (Pratt Reference Pratt2002). However, we get no clue here from the text who Dewey is talking about when he refers to savages. For example, indigenous peoples have an abiding reverence for the land and for Nature and simply would not comprehend Dewey’s quote above. What does it mean to “utilize” natural resources and to work them “for what they are worth”? Seen from a perspective of a century of such extractive activity upon the Earth, we are at what Bill McKibben (Reference McKibben2006) calls “the end of nature” and Dewey’s anthropocentric view seems dated in our posthumanist world. By this world I mean a view where humans are part of the ecology and not apart from it as Dewey has placed them. We are one form of life among many. Reading what Dewey says here, one wants to almost translate and update it, to decenter the human from what he is doing.
Dewey makes the humanist and Western argument for the transformation of the natural world into not only “weighted stimuli” (MW 9: 42) but also an accomplishment that allows humans to compress eons of development into a course of study. It is truly fantastical and chimerical this Panglossian “Deweyland” we have before us: “Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article, every aesthetic decoration, every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and favoring conditions” (MW 9: 42). Suffice to say this was the same ideology that proponents of native boarding schools used in the nineteenth century in the United States. Native garb and the long hair of men were extirpated as the young were “educated for extinction” and transformed into “civilization” (Adams Reference Adams1995). This industrial optimism of Dewey may have blinded him to what was missing, made all the more bizarre because Dewey worked, especially between the world wars, on conservation and care of the environment (Watras Reference Watras2015).
The greatest distillation of meaning occurs in language, and thus the emphasis upon it in the schools. But the abstractive nature of language can lead to its abuses in schools, where everything may be narrated and told, where ideas are poured in or deposited in a bank, as Paulo Freire called this kind of education, rather than using language as a tool to connect natural and built objects in the mind. Dewey here rails against the kind of narrated education where the psychological organization of material to be learned is jettisoned for the logical, the activity becomes the textbook: “For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit” (MW 9: 44).
The chapter thus builds a strong foundation for what many take away from Dewey: learning by doing. In the lab school, there was a focus upon activities that connected to the wider world, such as cooking, carpentry, and clothes making. It is important to establish what Dewey meant by such learning. It always had a social element to it “where one person’s use of material and tools is consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their capacities and appliances” (MW 9: 39). Modern proponents of learning by doing do not always keep this social focus in mind. In problem-based learning and constructivist learning the emphasis is upon cognition without the social element being prominent. Service-learning most clearly takes this social element of learning as central (Butin Reference Butin2010).
Chapter 3 sets us up well to develop the ideas on growth in chapter 4. Direction is a central component or condition of growth. Growth is a movement toward the fulfillment of potentiality, affected, as it were, by direction and guidance through the development of habits that enable adjustments to the environment.
