The first four chapters of Democracy and Education culminate in a view of education where “the result of the educative process is capacity for further education” (MW 9: 73). Chapter 5 brings clarity to this view by contrasting it to three other theories: education as preparation, education as unfolding, and education as formal discipline. Through these comparisons, Dewey brings into sharp focus the dynamic and democratic character of his own educational vision.Footnote 1
Non-Teleological Growth
The idea of teleology reaches back to Aristotle and the concept of telos, or final cause. Aristotle believed that all things tended toward a specific end and that such tendency was part of their nature. He conceived telos as a metaphysical category. We can, however, exploit the notion of teleological structure without committing to Aristotelian metaphysics. We may hold the view that some things exist in a state of open-ended development, while other things exist in transition toward a specific, pre-determined end. Under such a view, a teleological structure is a property of some things. And when it comes to social arrangements, it is a normative property: we give education a teleological structure when we value an end in such a way that we arrange practices and institutions as a means to that end. The end becomes a telos.
To illustrate this principle of teleological structure, let us consider the case of a 7th grade math class facing a high stakes test at the end of the academic year. The group of students is cognitively, emotionally, and culturally diverse. Ms. Tally is a creative teacher who knows how to adjust her lessons, linear equations in this case, to diverse learning styles and interests. While the learning paths that students take diverge based on their differences, eventually they must converge toward the destination of the pre-established end. Whatever method they use, in the end they must know how to solve and graph linear equations for the test. That end is fixed, and it gives the whole experience a teleological structure.
That the end is a telos does not mean that other ends cannot be pursued along the way or that there can be no diversity or flexibility in the process. It means, however, that in a hierarchy of values the telos trumps everything else. Educational experiences that meet the needs of diverse learning styles are valuable in themselves; students enjoy them directly. However, within a teleological structure what matters is the instrumental power to contribute toward the telos: meeting the needs of diverse learning styles is a value because it leads to improved performance in standardized tests. The essence of telos is tolerance of some flux, but only as long as it leads toward a secure, pre-determined destination. As Dewey puts it in Experience and Nature, it involves a “craving for the passage of change into rest, of the contingent, mixed and wandering into the composed and total” (LW 1: 78).
By contrast, Dewey’s is a democratic vision of education based on the:
democratic criterion [which implies] the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or social content, and as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as directive guardians of this reorganization
Social conditions are always in flux, new needs and interests emerge constantly, and with them, new groups, new forms of life, and new kinds of identity come into being. As a result, for a democracy to be inclusive and participatory, it must constantly recreate itself and empower individuals to take part in the reconstruction of meanings and values. Dewey believed that this particular conception of democracy, which he aptly described as “creative democracy” (LW 14), requires a democratic education that is non-teleological in character.
A non-teleological education pays attention to the unexpected and desirable in experience and continuously lets it inform the direction of learning. Let us turn to Ms. Tally’s class for illustration one more time. This time, Ms. Tally, parents, and administrators together have decided to not orient the class toward a high stakes test. Instead, Ms. Tally allows direction and aims for her class to emerge from the educational experience itself. As usual, she begins with a lesson on linear equations. She notices that it ignites curiosity in one student. Rather than moving on to cover pre-determined content, she encourages the student to pursue his interest – Ms. Tally makes pedagogical adjustments to be able to engage in individualized instruction. For the first time, the student understands the significance of using formulas and graphs to represent events in the real world. He grasps that this way of representation constitutes a powerful tool for thinking: he experiences it as a life changing insight. For over a year, the student has been engrossed in the world of data visualization, and now he wants to learn statistics to make his own data visualization art. These are pursuits that diverge too far from the originally intended goal, or end-in-view in Dewey’s vocabulary, of solving and graphing linear equations. Ms. Tally nonetheless recognizes that they are goals worth pursuing and together with the student they decide to set them up as aims.Footnote 3 The defining feature of non-teleological education is the fact that goals and direction emerge from experience and not the other way around.
Preparation
Theories of education as preparation see education as a process of preparation for “the responsibilities and privileges of adult life” (MW 9: 59), which is, strictly speaking, incontrovertible. The conceptions of childhood, growth, and preparedness implicit in these theories, however, are problematic. “Children are not regarded as social members in full and regular standing,” Dewey writes, “[t]hey are looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list” (MW 9: 59). The theories in question regard childhood as mere lack and growth as the overcoming of childhood (see chapter 4 of DE). One of the problems is that if growth leads toward some terminus of “ungrowth” (MW 9: 47), how do we know when we reach it?Footnote 4 In practice, the criterion can only be arbitrary: earning a degree or passing a state examination. In reality, “the responsibilities and privileges of adult life” are infinitely varied and ever changing, and the true test of preparedness is successful adjustment to the conditions of this or that particular adult life. Put differently, to be prepared means to be prepared to learn more. The best preparation, therefore, is the extraction of the most power for action out of the present educational setting. As Dewey argues in chapter 3 of DE, the present situation already contains within itself all the direction we need toward the future. The student who finds a connection between his new understanding of linear equations and his interest in data visualization derives from that experience motivation for action and gives direction to his own education. An experience like that is not just about learning algebra; it is about learning to adjust to new conditions and create value in response.
Unfolding
Theories of unfolding assume that within each individual there is a completed being in a state of latent potential, and the task of education is to facilitate its unobstructed unfolding. The problem with this view is that in setting up a fixed ideal toward which the unfolding takes place, “[l]ife at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding toward it” (MW 9: 61, emphasis mine).
In practice, the state of perfection at the end unfolding is infinitely remote and “strictly speaking […] unattainable” (MW 9: 61). So to provide some power to guide action, Dewey tells us, the teacher sets up some more immediate and concrete goal as working substitute. Pedagogically, the teacher “proceeds to ‘draw out’ from the pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that is evidence that the child is unfolding properly” (MW 9: 61). This “drawing out,” however, takes place by means of suggestive questioning or some other similar technique. Learning, then, rather than the unfolding of some immanent perfection, takes place as guidance by the teacher toward some concrete objective externally determined.
In this section, Dewey discusses two versions of education as unfolding, as articulated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Froebel. For Hegel, unfolding takes place through historical institutions embodying aspects of the Absolute. The essence of education under this view is conformity to the spirit of the times. In all their imperfections, the culture and institutions of a particular society embody a chapter in the history of the “world-spirit” toward the full self-realization of the Absolute. Individual agency, then, shrinks to a minimum; the only real agents of change are the “great ‘heroes’” (MW 9: 64). For Froebel, unfolding takes place through symbols. Our immanent perfection is initially dormant, but symbols awaken it. As an example, Dewey mentions that in kindergarten children sit in a circle, not only because it is a convenient arrangement, but because, from a Froebelian point of view, “it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind in general” (MW 9: 63). Children somehow possess a sense of collective life as part of their immanent perfection, and this sense is awakened by the symbol of the circle.
While theories of education as preparation are explicitly static, theories of unfolding pay lip service to “development, process, progress,” but “[s]ince growth is just a movement toward a completed being, the final ideal is immobile.” “Logically,” Dewey adds, “the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation theory” (MW 9: 61). And underlying such philosophies is telos.
Training of Faculties
Dewey identifies the philosophy of John Locke as the classic expression of the formal discipline conception of education. According to Locke, the world provides the material, which the senses receive passively, while the mind possesses specific faculties like perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing, and imagining. Knowledge happens when mental faculties are applied to materials from the world. In the hands of his successors, Locke’s theory of knowledge developed into a doctrine of the training of mental faculties. The idea is that mental faculties can be trained by repeated exercise independently of subject matter, and then easily “applied” to any material. The specific error in this view, Dewey claims, is the underlying dualism between alleged powers and materials. “There is no such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general” Dewey writes, “there is only the ability to see or hear or remember something,” and he adds with unusual causticity, “[t]o talk about training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense” (MW 9: 70).Footnote 5
As the example of non-teleological Ms. Tally illustrates, human capacities can develop in myriad possible directions, and education is a process of pursuing those directions in the fullness of their uncertainty. Education is like art, “experimental” and “adventurous” (MW 9: 150). If education becomes the mere training of faculties, the development of human capacities gets reduced to a checklist. The effect is the illusion that while life is complex and unpredictable, education is a simple affair of training by repetition. No uncertainties to be faced along the way; no changes in pedagogy, materials, curriculum, or aims in response to individual growth. The only adjustment allowed is the level of difficulty of repetitive exercises. Education is rendered a straight line.
Four Evils Today
Dewey identified four evils in the conception of education as preparation that are particularly relevant to education reform today and merit special attention. Theories of education as preparation are grounded in what Dewey calls the “negative and privative character of growth,” that is, thinking of growth merely as the correction of a deficiency. Dewey lists four “evil consequences” (MW 9: 59) of putting education on such a basis: (1) loss of impetus, (2) indecisiveness and procrastination, (3) a conventional average standard of expectation and requirement, and (4) necessary recourse on a large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain.
“Children proverbially live in the present,” Dewey writes, but when education is focused on the “future just as future,” children are demanded to turn their attention away from what naturally engrosses them in the present and “get ready for something, one knows not what nor why” (MW 9: 59). (1) The motive powers of the present get lost, inviting (2) indecisiveness and procrastination. If education is preparation for a future “a long way off,” we may wonder, what’s the rush, then, when “the present offers so many wonderful opportunities and proffers such invitations to adventure”? (MW 9: 59). Some learning always takes place when engaging with present conditions, but it is a “lesser education than if the full stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative as possible” (MW 9: 60).
When education is guided exclusively by a sense of preparedness for the future divorced from present interests and powers, (3) the result is a substitution of a conventional average standard for a standard grounded in the specific powers of the individual. The problem is a failure in precision, which is exactly what a standard of measurement is supposed to provide. Teachers can provide “severe and definite” judgments (MW 9: 60) on the specific strengths and weaknesses of a particular student; an average standard can only be “a vague and wavering opinion concerning what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more or less remote future” (MW 9: 60). Since the future has “no stimulating and directing power when severed from the possibilities of the present” we are forced to (4) “recourse on a large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain” (MW 9: 60). Dewey’s verdict on this is definitive: “It fails most just where it thinks it is succeeding – in getting a preparation for the future” (MW 9: 60).
The standards and accountability movement, so influential in recent education reform efforts, is a contemporary incarnation of the doctrine of education as preparation and it commits the four evils Dewey denounces. This movement has been in part inspired by an increased recognition of the importance of investment in what some economists call “human capital”Footnote 6 in preparation for an uncertain future, “because we simply don’t know what the jobs of tomorrow will look like” (World Economic Forum 2015).Footnote 7 The vocabulary of the Common Core Standards, as another example, is one of “preparedness” or being “college, career, and citizenship ready” (ASCD 2012). Despite all the acknowledged uncertainties, preparedness here has a precise and fixed meaning: productivity, profit, and competitiveness, as determined in boardrooms and government offices, and handed down to school districts.
By contrast, a non-teleological conception of education would foster in individuals the powers not only to contribute to the ends set by others, but also the powers to create values and ends themselves (see chapter 6 of DE). Advocates of standardization and accountability typically dismiss educational projects that put a premium on the quality of educational experience over fixed learning objectives. The assumption is that such a vision of education neglects the importance of readiness for the future as if declaring, irresponsibly: “things will change anyway, so forget about preparation!” But in fact, Dewey’s vision demands more in the way of preparedness. It means members of a creative democracy must be prepared to adjust not only to shifting means of production, but also help reorganize social life itself, and this creative capacity must be cultivated. Our obsession with technical training in S.T.E.M. fields to the detriment of the arts and humanities, so essential for critical and creative thought, is a sign that today’s policy leaders do not value creativity – in work or social life – when they talk about career, college, and citizenship “readiness.”
Conclusion
Dewey’s criticisms of formal discipline, preparation, and unfolding are critical for his conception of democratic education. Formal discipline, in reducing education to repetitive exercises, makes learning narrow. Theories of preparation and unfolding, in starting from a fixed notion of a complete human being, foreclose possibilities for growth from unanticipated contacts in life. A democracy is marked by “more numerous and more varied points of contact,” which “denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond” (MW 9: 93). This is a feature of democracy that Dewey celebrates, even when it means a degree of disorder. Dewey’s response, rather than imposing order by limiting contacts (segregating races, classes, cultures), is an education that “put[s] a premium on variation in […] action” (MW 9: 93). Education for democratic life is education for living in association with all kinds of people, in ways that allow for the actions and interests of others to affect one’s own.
In an open, progressive society, future possibilities are unpredictable, but this should not prevent the possibility of preparation for the future. “If education is growth,” Dewey writes, “it must progressively realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements” (MW 9: 60–1). The focus of education should be “making the present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of” (MW 9: 61).
“Democracy,” Dewey writes a quarter of a century after Democracy and Education, “is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained” (LW 14: 229). In other words, “faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education” (LW 9: 227); it is faith in growth, wherever it may lead.
