It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable.
Before reading Dewey’s chapter, it may be helpful to consider this quote that arises a few pages in. The passage summarizes Dewey’s critique of a certain way of thinking about education, which he associates with a German philosophical tradition following the ideas of J. F. Herbart.Footnote 1 But what does Dewey mean by “the past”? What role should the past play in how we define education? And why is “the genuinely novel” and “unforeseeable” so important in education? Answering these questions will be the focus of my commentary on this chapter.
It is worth noting that much of the terminology in this chapter may seem awkward, not representative of how we talk about education today. This is partly because many of the ideas are translated from the works of German educational philosophers who were influential in Dewey’s time. Although some of these ideas have lost currency, the chapter helps us better understand Dewey’s view of education.
This chapter is important for two central reasons. First, its placement in the structure of the book is significant; it forms the last of five chapters in which Dewey is primarily concerned with distinguishing his thinking on education with that of other key educational thinkers of his day, and it especially contrasts to the views presented in chapter 5. Second, in this chapter Dewey provides us with his own definition of education, a definition that will not only be significant throughout the rest of Democracy and Education but also arguably throughout all of Dewey’s work.
Education as Formation
What Is Formation?
Dewey is critical of the idea of “formation,” which he associates with a way of thinking about education as forming the individual’s mind by things “outside” the individual. On Dewey’s understanding, “formation” means that the outside environment works to determine how the individual thinks, and in turn, how he or she chooses to act.
Before going into the details of Dewey’s critique, it is important to point out that making sense of Dewey’s use of the term “formation” is not straightforward given the historical context of the term. As we have seen in previous chapters, many of the thinkers Dewey discusses are part of the German tradition of educational philosophy, such as Hegel and Froebel (see chapter 5 of DE). The notion of “formation” was the common translation of the German concept Bildung, which nowadays is often translated simply as “education.”Footnote 2 The term Bildung has a long-standing tradition in German educational philosophy. Classical German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt defined it as the “interplay between self and world” (Humboldt 1793/Reference Humboldt, Westbury, Hopmann and Riquarts2001; 1793/Reference Humboldt, Flitner and Giel1969). The concept of Bildung as an “interplay” includes the idea that an individual is not only formed by but also forms her environment, and that this interaction is educative. This meaning of the term is very much aligned with Dewey’s own notion of education as involving an interaction between self and world (as we will see in other chapters in DE) – even though he does not acknowledge this here.
One difficulty in understanding what Dewey means when he criticizes “education as formation” in this chapter is that, on a close reading, he is not addressing the broad notion of formation linked with the general concept of Bildung. Rather, he is connecting the idea of formation to a very specific conception of the development of mind in Herbart’s psychology.Footnote 3 This focus relates to the fact that his concern in this chapter, as in previous chapters, is to look at how theories of the mind affected pedagogical practice, specifically teachers’ practices of instruction. Here, Dewey is taking on Herbart, because at the time he was writing, Herbart’s theory had wide-reaching influence on instruction in schools. Herbart’s followers created an international educational movement called Herbartianism.Footnote 4 However, many of Herbart’s original ideas were changed so dramatically by the Herbartians that they have little to no resemblance with Herbart’s thinking.
At times in the chapter, we will see that much of Dewey’s critique of Herbart applies more to the Herbartians than to Herbart himself. But, setting this aside, Dewey’s interpretations of Herbart and the Herbartians tell us the kind of idea of education he is after. In particular, this chapter helps us more thoroughly understand Dewey’s view of the role of subject matter and environment in a child’s education.
The central complaint with Herbart’s notion of mind, and its implications for education, is found in Dewey’s statement: “The control is from behind, from the past” (MW 9: 76). What does he mean by that? As Dewey notes, Herbart did not believe that the various faculties and capacities of human beings were inborn, but rather he believed that they were learned. From this view of the mind, it followed that the environment of the learner – that is, the objects, resources, and ideas around him or her – and the teacher – that is, the person facilitating learning – both played a significant role in what the learner learned. The teacher had the responsibility of choosing which objects and ideas, or “subject matter,” should be included in the child’s environment, and also how (by which methods) this subject matter was to be presented to the learner so that he or she could learn from it. Dewey both praises and criticizes Herbart largely based on these two points, so to understand Dewey’s own view of education, it is worth considering what exactly Dewey likes and dislikes here.
For Dewey, in Herbart’s account of education, the old or “past” – that is, what the child has taken in from the environment and has therefore already learned (already knows and can do) – played too strong a role in shaping which new ideas or objects the child could take in. Put another way, any knowledge and ability that the child has already acquired, for example, a basic knowledge of shapes, like triangles and squares, affects the structures of the child’s mind in such a way that these were thought to play a primary role in determining what the child should learn next.
If we follow Herbart’s view, as Dewey argues, the teacher becomes all powerful. The teacher has the role of selecting the objects and ideas that should enter the child’s mind, as well as the order in which they should enter, so that older knowledge could properly shape new knowledge. While the subject matter of instruction changed, the process by which the teacher presented the new information to the learner remained the same. This process or method of instruction became known as the formal “steps,” and through the Herbartians, these steps became very rigidly interpreted.Footnote 5 Dewey’s problem with this idea of the teacher is that it represents “the Schoolmaster come to his own” (MW 9: 77), meaning that the teacher is all-knowing, and the child’s contribution to his or her own learning process is largely overshadowed.
Teaching as a Profession
Dewey does not want to entirely dismiss Herbart’s contribution to educational theory. Rather, he also highlights what he admires about Herbart. Specifically, he credits Herbart with conceiving of the teacher as a professional. This idea has relevance today as many teachers still have to defend their status as professionals on par with other professionals, such as doctors and lawyers. What is it that makes teaching a profession?
Dewey points out that Herbart rightly placed the choices involved in teaching within the realm of conscious decision-making. Herbart’s theory in many ways ushered in a new conception of teaching that can be seen as connected to what we today associate with the term “reflective practice.”Footnote 6 This means that a teacher’s judgments about what to teach or how to teach cannot be a matter of following one’s “casual inspiration” or whim, nor should they simply be a matter of following “routine” procedures without consideration of the changing needs of learners (MW 9: 77). In each of these cases, the teacher is not actively thinking about his or her work with learners. On Dewey’s view, the teacher is one who thinks and judges according to the aims and principles of the educational profession, and according to the needs of the learner.
Dewey also values Herbart’s emphasis on the importance of “content” or subject matter, even though he was critical of how it was formally presented in “steps.” Today, we talk about the teaching profession as requiring a special kind of knowledge about the content of learning called “pedagogical content knowledge.” Lee Shulman famously defines pedagogical content knowledge as an educator’s knowledge of “the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others […] and this includes an understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult” (Shulman 2004: 203). This means that teachers need to have knowledge beyond their disciplines, so a mathematics teacher not only has to know mathematics well but also has to know how to break apart mathematical ideas so that young learners can come to understand them.Footnote 7
As we continue through this chapter, as well as in other chapters (e.g., chapter 12 of DE), we will see how Dewey continues to place emphasis on the fact that a professional teacher involves having a particular perspective on children and their development, a perspective quite different from other professions.
Despite Dewey’s praise of Herbart, we can see that ultimately he believes Herbart placed too much emphasis on the teacher’s role in attending to “the old, the past,” that is, what the learner already knows and has learned. He believed that Herbart did not pay enough attention to how the teacher is also “a learner”Footnote 8; the teacher learns from the “genuinely novel and unforeseeable” that the child brings to the learning situation (MW 9: 77).
Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection
Nature and Culture
Dewey directs our attention to two other ideas of “the past” that have affected how we understand education: on the one hand, our natural or biological past, which we call heredity, and on the other, our cultural past, which we call heritage. What roles do nature and culture play in what and how a human being learns? How educators answer this question has consequences not only for how they will interact with children, but also for what they will choose as worthwhile subject matter in the curriculum.
The notion of growth (which Dewey discussed at length in chapter 4 of DE) plays a central role in how Dewey thinks we should answer this question, and finds it problematic that others answer this question without consideration of growth. Dewey names two problematic threads of thought, which both arise from the Herbartians: the recapitulation view and the retrospective view. The recapitulation view is largely credited to German philosopher and educator Tuiskon Ziller,Footnote 9 and, as Dewey points out, had little influence.Footnote 10 However, the retrospective view seems to have had a lasting influence, through to today.
Is the retrospective view still present in the way teachers teach in our classrooms today? Before going further, I invite readers to consider their own schooling in answering this question. Ask yourself: Did my teachers assign literature from a canon of texts without my input? If so, did they give me any insight into why these texts were chosen as part of the canon and others not? and, Did I feel that my own identity and background, for example, in terms of gender, race, religion, or cultural heritage, were represented in the canon of texts we read? If you answered no to these questions, it suggests that your teachers (intentionally or not) were operating according to a retrospective view of education.
For Dewey, the retrospective view (and its predecessor, the recapitulation view) fails to account for human growth in biological and cultural terms. On the biological side, it sees certain traits as fixed and fails to account for the fact that human beings adapt and change over time.Footnote 11 On the cultural side, it fails to account for the new ideas and practices that human beings develop in collaboration with one another: for example, new understandings of good leadership, new ways to build houses, grow food, or ensure clean water.
If we fail to account for growth in how we define education, what might be the potential consequences for us? If, in their theories of education, educators do not account for the changes that happen over time in our biological make-up and socio-cultural development – the changes that contribute to how we live in the present day – then in their practice they may overlook the present life of the child:
The social environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. To ignore the directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational function.
In emphasizing the present, is Dewey saying that the past is not important, or does not have an educational function? Certainly not. Rather, he is pointing out that if educational theorists place so much emphasis on the past in how they view the child’s proper development, then as a consequence they will treat subject matter as a set of fixed products of the past, a series of unchanging truths and knowledge that is pre-packaged for consumption by students. In doing so, educational theorists and practitioners miss how the child’s present environment – the child’s home life, people in her community, the objects in her environment, her day-to-day activities – affects who she is and who she can become. By overlooking the child’s present environment, or rendering it less important than the past, we fail to consider how to make it educational, that is, full of meaning and contributing to growth, as opposed to stifling growth.
How do we make the past and the present educational?
Heredity and Educability
Dewey contends that by viewing heredity as a set of fixed traits, we set limits on what the educator can see as possible in a child’s development (MW 9: 80). For example, if a teacher adopts the view that girls, by nature, do not have mathematical ability, then the teacher might not focus on math in the curriculum for the girls, and may only offer it comprehensively to boys. In contrast, Dewey argues, we must view the child as “educable,” that is, capable of learning, in all aspects of life (MW 9: 81). When teachers see all children as educable, their minds can open up to multifarious possibilities for educating them.
The notion of educability has its roots in a long tradition of educational philosophy, which Dewey is almost certainly drawing on, although he does not mention it here. In particular, it connects to Rousseau’s idea of perfectiblité (translated as perfectibility or “plasticity,” a term Dewey discusses in chapter 4 of DE). It also connects to Herbart’s term Bildsamkeit (translated as educability), which Herbart named as the first principle of education.Footnote 12 Dewey’s discussion makes the important point that teachers’ perspectives on child development are important because they determine the choices teachers make when educating a child. Here, Dewey is again distinguishing the professional perspective of the educator from other professions: for example, that of the biologist. Whereas biologists might have reason to believe, for example, that children with certain genetic traits will not be able to develop advanced language skills, professional educators take the perspective that every human being has the capacity for communication, and therefore see it as their professional responsibility to do everything in their power to foster this capacity. As Dewey states, the principle of educability applies to every child (MW 9: 81).Footnote 13
Heritage and Social Growth
The ideas of growth that Dewey applies to his view of heredity also come into play in his view of heritage. The complex knowledge that is a result of unique inventions and has been accumulated over generations is clearly important in education; it forms the subject matter of any school curriculum. Dewey is not claiming we should not pass on the important heritage of human beings to the next generation, but rather, he wants us to deeply consider the process by which we pass on these important “products” of human history. He writes that the aim of educational subject matter is to “keep the process alive.” (MW 9: 81)
Why is the process so important? And, which methods of instruction use subject matter in a way that keeps the process alive? In chapter 12 of DE, Dewey will dive deeper into his theory of instructional method. Here, however, he begins to hint at a core problem with traditional methods of instruction: these methods rely on a dualism between process and product, based on a dualism between child (individual) and environment (world). By advocating for subject matter of instruction that keeps the process alive, Dewey is arguing that the child needs to understand the process by which knowledge came to be considered “knowledge.” In other words, it is not just the finished products, for example classic poem, that the child may need to know but also “the life of which they were the products” (MW 9: 81). This means the child should have the opportunity to understand things such as how the poem was created, what the life of the poet was like, the historical situation in which it was written, and why the poem is valued over others. The teacher can add to this by setting assignments in which the child writes his or her own poems and experiences some of the challenges involved in “making” poems. When the subject matter in a classroom reveals to learners the way knowledge came about, the context of its discovery and the struggle of acquiring new knowledge,Footnote 14 learners can become engaged in it and ask questions, such that it becomes “educational subject matter” (MW 9: 81). Subject matter is educational, which has meaning for the child’s own present thoughts and future life experiences. In this way, the past is also given meaning for the child:
The past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but on condition that it has been seen as past of the present, and not as another and disconnected world.
Here again we see Dewey carving out the teacher’s professional perspective as different from other professions. The teacher’s role is not to be an archeologist, digging up and preserving knowledge, as an archeologist would dig up artifacts of human life and preserve them in a perfected state. Rather, the teacher has the task of taking subject matter and transforming it, so that it can become part of the learner’s life, contributing to his or her thoughts, judgments, and actions.
Education as Reconstruction
Up to this point, Dewey has spent time making us aware of a central problem in how we educate that is still relevant today, namely, that there is too much emphasis in teaching as passing on knowledge as finished “products,” which we call today “teaching as transmission,” and too little emphasis on the process of learning by which knowledge becomes connected to learners’ lives. However, Dewey would view it as equally problematic if educators simply did the opposite and became passive observers, while the child directed his or her own learning situation. Some have falsely interpreted Dewey as radically child-centered or “progressive” in this sense. To think this is what Dewey is after would be to miss Dewey’s emphasis on the teacher’s role in shaping the educational environment and making choices for each child that ensure his or her continued growth.
Bearing this in mind, we come to Dewey’s technical definition of education, a definition which sharply contrasts with what he called the “ordinary” definition of education found in chapter 1:
[Education] is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which 1) adds to the meaning of experience, and 2) which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.
The individual, or the mind, reconstructs the experiences had in interaction with the environment. Human beings are only capable of such reconstruction because they have the “power to grow” (see chapter 4 of DE on growth). Dewey’s example of the child touching a hot light for the first time illustrates how human beings, in his view, add meaning to their experiences and learn to direct subsequent experiences. By touching the hot light, the child experiences something unexpected, and perhaps uncomfortable, but this helps him learn about the properties of the object in his environment; the child connects it to his “old, or past” knowledge about objects, and thus adds to how he may view other similar objects in the future. The child thereby gains the ability to direct his future experiences, because he now has a broader sense of what might be hot, and what consequences that may lead to (e.g., pain). Thus, he gains the capacity to more comprehensively judge his environment and his interactions with others.
Thinking of our interactions with people, rather than just objects, we start to see how Dewey’s notion of education has a moral meaning. If we learn to understand the consequences of our actions, we can better direct our interactions with others toward mutually respectful ends. The social and moral meanings embedded in Dewey’s views are addressed in the next chapter on democracy and education.
As readers continue through the book, gaining more insight into Dewey’s definition of education, it is worth continuing to ask yourself: Is Dewey’s idea of education represented in the public’s view of education today, or is it still overshadowed by the “ordinary” definition of education?
