The Context of Dewey’s Writing

At the time of Democracy and Education’s publication, the world was enmeshed in a new era of science and psychology, while also facing the social and political turmoil of a major world war. As new advances in medicine and measurement were developed, soldiers were identified for appropriate positions relative to their aptitudes and educational backgrounds. There was a fresh interest in understanding the mind of the learner, including measuring its capacities through newly developed tests. More insidiously, there was accelerating interest in comparing cognitive abilities across racial groups, as part of the eugenics movement that sought to understand supposed natural superiority of the behavior and intelligence of some people. Dewey’s work is located within this scientific study of the learner, including his careful exploration of how the child is similar to and different from other organisms and tracing that child’s development across time. But whereas many psychologists and scientists of the time (from Alfred Binet to Edward Thorndike) largely studied each learner as a distinct individual, Dewey was unwilling to abstract students in this way, always examining their learning and activity in light of their social context and environment. So while his work fits alongside theirs, it is also quite different, offering a more naturalistic, comprehensive, and social understanding of the learner.

As part of his account of action and in response to the prevailing conditions of the day, throughout Democracy and Education, Dewey traces the life of organisms and shows how humans are unique organisms, best supported in democratic social environments. For example, in this key chapter on growth, he differentiates the development of animals from children, showing that while animals tend to more quickly gain physical independence from their parents, children and society actually benefit from prolonged dependency in human youth. It offers children more opportunities for engaging their plasticity – to adapt and transform with the support of other people. In addition, prolonged dependency enables children to learn how to learn, especially in interdependent ways that foster social skills (MW 9: 48–9).

This celebration of the potential within children and their process of development is a shift from seeing children as lazy, overly dependent, or indulging in meaningless play. It helps us to see that children are engaged in the real and useful process of growth and habit formation. Indeed, he makes some of these connections more pronounced later in the book, including in chapter 15 where Dewey connects his ideas on growth, education, habits, and play by urging teachers to take children’s play seriously and to direct it toward focused intellectual growth and the development of social habits, rather than just haphazard learning (MW 9: 203–5). Ultimately, the key elements of this chapter are picked up again throughout Dewey’s corpus, but especially within his 1922 publication Human Nature and Conduct, where he explores habits and their role in daily social life in great detail, and his 1938 book Experience and Education, where he incorporates these elements into his theory of experience and how to best facilitate experiences in classrooms.

Defining Growth

In an intriguing approach likely to catch the attention of the reader, Dewey introduces the concept of growth through a series of revealing claims that seem to be counterintuitive to common understandings. As most people did one hundred years ago, most people today continue to think of growth as having an end, as if there is some fixed goal that is met after a process of growth occurs. As did those before us, we tend to conjure images of racecourses with a clearly defined finished line, at which point the process is finished and done. Turning this view on its head, Dewey suggests that growth should actually be viewed as an end in itself. While he does state that “This cumulative movement of action toward a later result is what is meant by growth,” this later result is not fixed, final, or once-and-for-all (MW 9: 46). Rather, the result and related aims shift and change as a part of the process of growth. Moreover, the very process of growth itself is worthwhile, as it carries us from one satisfactory activity to the next.

In order to show the relationship between growth and education, Dewey notes, “Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education” (MW 9: 56). So rather than envisioning a finish line that demarcates an end to learning or the successful completion of learning, Dewey is saying here that our focus should be on educative experiences that lead us to continued learning and more growth, a never-ending racecourse where one should be content to focus on the multiple, related, and building steps along the way without a goal at the end to judge our learning or our success in relation to. This is what Dewey means in his famous quote, “The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end” (MW 9: 54). Good educators, then, are tasked with supplying the conditions that best facilitate growth, without concern for an end beyond educational growth itself.

Again, countering common views of his day, Dewey celebrates immaturity as the condition that gives rise to growth. Some of those common views linger today as parents struggle to determine the degree to which they should shield their children and the degree to which they should push them along in developing. Whereas immaturity is typically thought of in negative terms, as a lack, Dewey contends that immaturity operates positively, because it provides room for growth. Or, in his words, immaturity entails “the ability to develop” and “the power to grow” (MW 9: 46–7, emphasis in original). Dewey similarly shows that, while children are typically thought of as being dependent, another negative connotation, dependence actually provides the conditions that urge children to develop new abilities. Children actually constructively build new skills, often through a process of interdependence whereby children employ social skills that elicit cooperative help from others despite their physical dependencies on adults. He says, “From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness” because it engages us in interdependent transactions with those around us that help us become better members of society (MW 9: 49).

This discussion of growth via immaturity and dependence fits with Dewey’s overall outlook on children, insofar as he does not look at children as lacking or as “not yet adults,” but rather as having potential and abilities. He also warns that we should not think of children as reaching a final end of growth, a terminus, in adulthood. Such thinking would place a static end on growth, the very notion of a fixed goal that he overturned in his initial discussion of growth. And he shows us how such thinking leads to faulty educational practice, such as employing mechanical and drill approaches, which presume a specific end that a child should be brought up to, rather than focusing on growth itself. This understanding flew in the face of curriculum traditionalists like Franklin Bobbitt (Reference Bobbitt, Flinders and Thornton2012) and, later, Ralph Tyler (Reference Tyler, Schaffarzick and Hampson1975) and James Popham (Reference Popham, Flinders and Thornton2012), who called for specific and measurable objectives of student learning that were scientifically mapped onto specific vocational goals identified through analysis of industry in the fashion of Taylorism.Footnote ¹

As Dewey celebrates the potential of immaturity for growth, he highlights plasticity as that which enables the adaptability of children. It is plasticity that allows children to learn from their experiences. It enables them to change their activities and environments to meet their needs or when similar conditions arise in the future. And plasticity facilitates the development of habits that allow them to function fluidly. Plasticity is closely aligned with adaptation, a scientific notion that Dewey plucks from Charles Darwin and bolsters with an account of intelligent reflection that guides adaptation. Plasticity is also aligned with the view of perfectibility and educability put forward by another important philosopher of education Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his famous book, Emile, which celebrates the natural curiosities of children and their capacities to learn. Dewey also later takes up the idea of educability in chapter 6 of DE as he describes how an individual can take prior knowledge and experience and connect it to current experience to open new and enhanced possibilities for understanding and learning. For Dewey, when we learn by doing and trying things out, we are able to adapt that action in novel situations in the future. When we learn to adapt, we can cultivate a habit of learning – we learn how to learn (MW 9: 50).

Cultivating Habits

That brings us to Dewey’s final rather counter-intuitive concept: habits. Whereas most people see habits as routine behavior we repeat indefinitely without conscious thought, Dewey contends that habits offer us the proclivities toward action and the ability to act. Such action is what enables us to traverse the world around us, learning from it, adapting it, and changing ourselves as we grow.

Habits are central to the theory of action Dewey develops throughout this book and across his work. Habits begin with impulses that naturally urge us to act. As we transact with the world, engage in the process of inquiry, and are shaped by cultural norms, our impulses collect and mold into habits. These are ways of being, sensitivities, dispositions, and ways of acting that enable us to live our lives smoothly because we use them most often with ease and familiarity. Rather than merely repeating identical routines, as many people refer to them in common parlance, however, habits in Dewey’s view are predispositions to act. As Dewey explains in this chapter, “Any habit marks an inclination—an active preference and choice for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait, Micawberlike, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy; it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation” (MW 9: 53). In this way, habits actually seek to be put into action, to be tried out in new and different settings. They do not merely operate as defaults we fall back on in old familiar environments.

As a will to act, habits are connected not only to doing, but also thinking. Habits, as Dewey later explains in greater detail in Human Nature and Conduct, “do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging, conceiving and reasoning that is done” (MW 14: 124). In other words, they enable and enhance our reason. As we encounter new stimuli, habits help us to filter and organize those encounters, influencing how we perceive aspects of the stimuli and the environment. Habits, then, come before our ideas; habits shape them. And, importantly, habits give us the know-how to act in the world because they entail our working capacities.

Habits, thought, and inquiry engage in a reciprocal relationship. Habits enable us to implement our thoughts in the world as we test them out. Then, by reflecting on our actions and our tests, inquiry prompts us to adjust our current habits to better suit the world or to develop new ones. When a test fails, when new conditions arise, or when we face a problematic situation, we are forced to bring our habits into consideration. In this way, habits should not be thought of as merely routine, unthinking behavior – what he calls habituation. Instead, habits are closely tied to intelligence. In chapter 4, Dewey explains that it is the intellectual aspect of habit that gives habits meaning and keeps the person elastic and growing (MW 9: 53-4).

As organisms transact with their environment, including the people and traditions within it, their habits are shaped by others. Often we develop similar habits that result from analogous transactions with the environment. Because these habits are shared across groups of people, they become customs, or typical ways of behaving within a social group. Similar habits and customs are developed in many different situations, but their cultivation is often most overt in schools, where children watch, imitate, and interact with others as they learn about socially acceptable behaviors and societal traditions, through both direct and indirect teachings. Teachers can guide the inquiry process so that students employ the reciprocal relationship between thought and habit to change and grow themselves, and to direct their habits toward improved practices of democracy with others. Teachers do this, in large part, by providing environments and experiences that are conducive to the use and success of good social habits that support our individual growth and our wellbeing when working together in a community. So while we may assume that teachers give specific knowledge or impart particular skills, Dewey’s account of the role of the teacher is much more about determining and crafting the kinds of environments where children are likely to learn themselves or craft good habits that enable further learning in the future. The process requires close and intimate relations between teacher and student, yet is also a more indirect notion of learning than many of us picture when we imagine good teachers. Dewey describes these processes in more detail in chapters 11 and 12, where he further details the processes of experience and thinking in schools and how teachers can support them.

Dewey does not entirely distinguish his notion of habits from the more colloquial ways in which we understand them as sometimes debilitating or overwhelming, like someone might describe the habit of smoking or of overeating. He would call these fixed habits, seeing them as restrictive because they have a hold on us, rather than us on them (MW 9: 53). He explains that these types of routine habits “mark the close of the power to vary” (MW 9: 54). In other words, they keep us set in our ways and stop us from engaging our plasticity or growing. These bad habits are disconnected from intelligence, exempt from the criticism or deliberation of the reasoning mind. These bad habits are prevented by continually remaining flexible, by adapting to novel situations, reflecting on one’s actions, and by engaging in the process of inquiry about one’s circumstances.Footnote ²

Later, in Experience and Education, Dewey connects bad, fixed habits to experience. There he argues that a good experience “arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future” (LW 13: 20–1). Good experiences are educative, they lead to growth and provide continuity, while bad or uneducative experiences prevent growth, stifle interest in the world, produce bad attitudes, or fail to compliment the individual’s changing world. The concept of growth illustrates how experiences can develop our physical, intellectual, and moral capacities – actualizing these capacities and helping them to inform one another so that they continue in a chain (though not necessarily linearly). The movement invoked by experience compounds upon itself, and is expressed as growth.

Growth, Habits, and Plasticity in Contemporary Schools and Educational Philosophy

Dewey’s ideas from chapter 4 remain relevant to educational practice and philosophy. For example, Dewey’s work on growth, inquiry, and experience continues to be discussed in terms of experiential education, especially outdoor education where students must regularly transact with novel and challenging situations to rethink their understandings and shape themselves anew. It is noteworthy that the key concepts from this chapter are applicable both in traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms, as well as non-traditional settings, from the wilderness to online. Within each, children need teachers who can help provide or shape their engagement with an environment in order to foster growth, elicit plasticity, and form good flexible habits.Footnote ³

Two major philosophers of education have also applied Dewey’s ideas from this chapter in creative and important ways. Maxine Greene (Reference Greene1988) builds upon Dewey’s notion of habit formation, intelligence, and growth to conceive of a notion of freedom whereby freedom is the ability to do otherwise – to construct new understandings and fashion new habits that carry one out of a space of restriction into newness and growth. This is a process of intelligent reflection and imagination. And Nel Noddings (Reference Noddings2013) has extended Dewey’s work on growth to show how to foster it socially through relations of care between teachers and students.

Dewey’s notion of habits can help us understand how some of the problems of racism and sexism in schools become entrenched through bad habits (Stitzlein Reference Stitzlein2008). Philosopher Shannon Sullivan (Reference Sullivan2001) also uses Dewey to envision more flexible ways of forming and transforming identity. Elsewhere, various thinkers have responded to Dewey scholar Robert Westbrook who criticizes that, although Dewey promoted deeper ways of participating in democracy and engaging in social life, he failed to fully explain how to achieve his vision (Westbrook Reference Westbrook1993: 317). Instead, he alluded to the need for developing democratic habits through “continuous social planning,” without detailing what those habits are or how to acquire them (MW 14). In reply, Kathy Hytten and I have attempted to explicate what democratic habits, in particular, might look like. We aim to provide some direction for how the capacities for action Dewey lays out in this chapter might be fostered in schools and employed in social life to achieve good democracy (Stitzlein Reference Stitzlein2014; Hytten Reference Hytten2016).

Elsewhere in the realm of educational psychology, Dewey’s work on growth and flexibility holds interesting connections to increasingly popular work by scholars such as Carol Dweck (Reference Dweck2007) and Paul Tough (Reference Tough2013). These scholars have sought to determine which characteristics render some children more successful academically and lead to patterns of lifelong learning. Resembling Dewey’s account of plasticity, habit formation, and growth, Dweck’s research demonstrates that one’s mindset is not something bounded and innate, but rather is malleable. Those who approach their intelligence and learning with a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed one, are able to employ educative experiences to adapt themselves and cultivate new learning and habits. Future work explicating links between Dewey’s philosophy and advances in educational psychology may prove useful for shaping better quality classroom instruction.

These contemporary applications continue to demonstrate the longstanding usefulness of Dewey’s notions of growth, habits, and plasticity.Footnote ⁴ These concepts and capacities offer significant pathways for better understanding and fostering good educative encounters and experiences.