Dewey’s narrative in Democracy and Education finally turns to the concept of democracy in chapter 7, where he provides one of the most original and compelling interpretations of the democratic ideal ever conceived. In the first six chapters, Dewey discusses education as a life function, as a social function, and as a process of growth. In the preceding chapter 6, he provides his definition of education focused on reconstruction of experience imbued with moral and social meaning, and future direction. It is in chapter 7 that he asks us to consider the type of community we wish to promote growth toward and within, and what kinds of moral and social meaning ought to be shaping the educational experiences. Dewey presents his democratic conception as a response to this question.
Dewey’s conception of democracy is unique for many reasons, but chief among them is his wide-angle lens. Democracy is presented as a broadly social, rather than exclusively or narrowly political, ideal. Giving his naturalist interpretation of democracy, situating it in lived conditions for both individual and social growth, Dewey’s democratic ideal provides a key conceptual anchor for the rest of Democracy and Education as a whole.
The Implications of Human Association
Dewey begins by explaining that “social life” is not one thing but refers to many different types of human association. He wants to shake up our tendencies to use “social life” and “community” – terms he uses somewhat interchangeably in this chapter – to only refer to ideal types. Both terms have both a normative and a descriptive meaning; the former referring to what we would ideally like to see in our associations, the latter what we actually find in our real social lives. Dewey believes that the idealizing tendency renders these terms “so ‘ideal’ as to be of no use, having no reference to facts” (MW 9: 88). All education socializes its members, he writes, but the “quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group” (MW 9: 88). Thus, Dewey advises, we’d best think about what kinds of habits and aims we should cultivate in education. We should develop criteria for these habits and aims that both aspire to “the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement” (MW 9: 89).
It is here that Dewey presents the two criteria for such a society. In any social group there are interests held in common, and there is also interplay and cooperation between individuals in different groups. From this description of social life Dewey derives the twin criteria, presented as questions, for the associational life in which education should be formed and fostered: “How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association?” (MW 9: 89). Note that Dewey has thus far not yet uttered the word “democracy” in this chapter, but is building an argument for the democratic ideal grounded in forms of associational life that he believes best promote individual and social growth. This kind of society represents a particular type of democratic ideal, one that prizes experience, participation, experimentation, and pluralistic organizational forms. After he explains the two criteria below, Dewey will then differentiate his democratic ideal from those formed in earlier theoretical and historical contexts: Platonic, Individualistic, and Nationalistic.
The Common or Shared Interests among Members of Groups
The first of the two criteria refers to shared interests among group members. Dewey uses the example of a despotic state to illustrate the importance of this criterion. In a state run by a tyrannical ruler or government, shared interests are not organically created because there is little or no “back and forth among members of the social group,” and people are united in a common interest of avoiding the backlash of their coercive ruler or government. Fear indeed unites people in the society, but only in developing their capacity to hide, stay safe, and keep silent.
In a free society, however, “all members of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others” (MW 9: 90). These shared communications are especially essential for groups that have cleavages such as distinct social classes that serve to arrest individual and social growth through isolation. Isolation of individuals or of types of groups leads to isolation of thought and communication, and, as a result, stifles growth. Interaction among diverse individuals is essential to growth, adaptation, and flexible responses to life’s changing circumstances. These communications among diverse individuals create shared interests; common interests are discovered and constructed through free and equitable intercourse among members; these common interests will alter or shift over time as contexts change.
Take, as a contemporary example, the networks created by #BlackLivesMatter. The difficult and divisive issues of racism in the United States have for centuries arrested individual and social growth, particularly among oppressed citizens but also for all racial groups. New social media, in the context of contemporary police violence against African American citizens, allows for increased interaction among diverse individuals regarding the experiences of racism and their consequences. While digital divides still plague our society, social media networks are increasingly diverse in membership and accessible to many. These new media help combat the isolation and rigidity in discussions about and movements to combat racism, and can feed new institutional responses to racist events and policies. The new communication networks promote individual growth, too, as minds are expanded and assumptions challenged in online exchanges. Shared interests achieved through free associational exchange are a source of more flexible and humane social control, far more lasting than those achieved through despotic forms of government. Rather than top-down institutional responses to racism imposed by leaders, Dewey would argue that democratic responses created through the results of equitable exchanges of free individuals are more powerful and lasting because they can produce individual and social growth.
The Full and Free Interplay of Associations and Groups
Greater reliance on common shared interests within groups, as a source of social control, is one of the features of democracy, in Dewey’s view. A second feature is the freer interaction between social groups, which allows for changes in social habits as “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse” (MW 9: 92). This criterion, concerned with freedom of individuals and groups, is the flip side of the first, which is concerned with discovering and communicating the common interests of the group.
Groups can become anti-social, closed off, and isolated from larger society. Social classes, families, schools, or other kinds of associations quite easily lead to exclusiveness among members. It is this tendency that Dewey wishes to call out and remedy with the second social criterion of his democratic ideal. Isolation makes for “rigidity” and for “static and selfish ideals within the group” (MW 9: 92). Individuals must freely associate within and across groups; groups achieve growth when our associations are wide, and when our social groups are porous in boundary rather than sealed off. Returning again to our #BlackLivesMatter example, we can see how social media networks are built through the ubiquitous connections available through digital technologies. Social media networks are the porous connections that can create associations between diverse and sometimes isolated groups. #BlackLivesMatter messages can infiltrate across organizational boundaries, informing the ways that these organizations and institutions readjust their actions and policies related to social problems of racism.
The Democratic Ideal
So we arrive at the point in chapter 7 where Dewey labels his ideal. These two traits “are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society” (MW 9: 92). “Democratic ideal” here is not set up as a telos derived from the wisdom of ancient Greek philosophers, or from an Enlightenment metaphysical ideal of individual rights, for example, but from a criterion on what kind of social life we need to create conditions for individual and social growth. Dewey’s “democracy” is an extension of his organic experimentalist view of nature, humanity, and social life. It has no grand epistemological or political foundations. In part this is because Democracy and Education is a work of educational rather than political theory, but also because Dewey’s political theory was, like his educational theory, arising from his observations of how human beings are naturally constituted and exist in the world as living, changing, growing organisms.
It is this naturalism that led Dewey to define democracy more holistically than most: “as more than a form of government; […] a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (MW 9: 93). This is a definition that invites wide participation in social groups in the belief that group life and exchanges are made more intelligent by diversity of viewpoints. In Dewey’s own time, this notion of citizens as capable participants in significant matters of political decision-making was a radical one; he engaged in many public exchanges with “political realists” such as Walter Lippmann (Reference Lippmann1925) who thought democracy was best left to administrative experts. By this, Lippman meant that governing was so complex and required such expertise that it could not be simply given over to “the people” in any simplistic manner, and he believed most citizens were not interested in, nor capable of doing, the work of helping govern their own society. These tensions over how much citizens can and ought to participate in democratic processes are still with us today, making Dewey’s thesis here quite relevant. His premise in Democracy and Education was that children are not born with abilities to think and act democratically, and therefore schools and society must shape our habits and intelligences so as to promote democratic associations. Those democratic associations, Dewey asserted, can grow from our natural needs to associate and communicate as human beings.
The standard – called by Dewey “superficial” – reason offered for linking democracy and education is “a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are education” (MW 9: 93). This idea is attributed to U.S. founding leader Thomas Jefferson among many others. Dewey, however, offers a “deeper explanation” of the connection. Democracy, he says, is a way of life, not simply a form of government.
Dewey’s concept of democracy does not refer to any particular organizational or structural forms; that is, there is no prescription as to how an organization, system, or society is to be set up or works, so long as the two criteria of common interest and free interplay of individuals and groups are met. For Dewey, democracy is not simply a political ideal but a broadly social one perfectly designed to promote growth in a diverse, changing society. Dewey saw, in his time, the “development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication” rapidly changing the ways in which the previously agrarian United States had functioned (MW 9: 93). Add to this the great forces of social change of Dewey’s time, such as labor and civil rights movements, the rapid rise of scientific discovery, and the great expansion of state educational systems, all of which led him to articulate a democratic ideal as an open, flexible criterion rather than set social standard or organizational form. The democratic ideal is served by increasing the
number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which keep men from perceiving the full import of their activity.
Varied points of contact give a greater diversity of stimuli; they “secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed so long as the inclinations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests” (MW 9: 93). Dewey means by this that democracy as a social ideal, rather than just a form of government, creates more open communication between individuals and associations; it creates more points of contact to more fully shape interests and social direction, thereby helping to break down rigid constructions of identity and interest.
Dewey’s notion of democracy is naturalist, bound up in his view of how individual and social growth – also known as “progress” – is best produced in a society made up of great diversity of individuals, classes, and groups. “After greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the other have come into existence [in this era], it is a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend them” (MW 9: 93). The challenge of education is to create the deliberate social effort to sustain communities of interest that can respond to challenges and grow, and adapt accordingly. Dewey would expand this notion of democracy a decade later in The Public and Its Problems (LW 2). But in Democracy and Education Dewey is focused upon explaining how his democratic ideal intersects with and importantly differs from several other important educational theories and eras described as democratic. He begins this comparative examination with Plato.
Platonic Educational Philosophy
Plato’s vision focuses on the stable organization of the just state. Justice for Plato requires that individuals do what they are best suited or born to do, whereby the business of education is to train those individual gifts for social use. The just society, in other words, exists when social arrangements promote a harmonious ordering of individual gifts for overall social function. Philosophers rule this just state, because they are lovers of wisdom who use reason to discern and recognize true knowledge, and they are thus best able to order society and individuals according to that knowledge.
For Dewey, Plato’s view is too limited, in its conception of individual diversity and capacity, as well as in the number and diversity of social groups and classes. Human beings are of infinite variety, not able to be squeezed into the three classes Plato envisioned. Dewey sees Plato’s educational theory as doomed because it arises in the context of a society that “was so undemocratic that Plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he so clearly saw” (MW 9: 95). Plato had an inadequate sense of individual uniqueness, no recognition that “each individual constitutes his own class” (MW 9: 96).
Platonic educational theory also envisions an overall purpose or “end” of social life that Plato believes to be an essential guide to a just state, but how does the knowledge of this final end come? It is only through the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, that final purposes can be discerned. For Dewey, this is not how knowledge is created. Knowledge is constructed through shared inquiry, not through the specialized wisdom of philosophers working in isolation from the rest of society. In the end, Dewey finds Plato’s vision laudable but highly flawed: “Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary it was none the less in bondage to static ideals” (MW 9: 97).
The “Individualistic” Ideal of the Eighteenth Century
Dewey next turns to the eighteenth-century European humanistic tradition associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau and thinkers like him turned to “nature” to discover educational models. “The free development of the individual and all its variety” is the theory on offer here (MW 9: 97). With an interest in social progress and human betterment through the creative powers of the individual, this theory heralded cosmopolitanism; “the positive ideal was humanity” (MW 9: 98). “Man’s capacities” when liberated from the state would move society toward progress as his talents and gifts are set free from the yoke of the state and its “selfish rulers” (MW 9: 98). “The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society” (MW 9: 98).
The key to a free society was, for Rousseau, liberating the individual from the false constraints of social life. “Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in insuring this more social society” in which humans would be emancipated from the “internal chains of false beliefs and ideals” (MW 9: 98). Social life and existing institutions were too false, too corrupt to “be intrusted with this work” thus “nature” was to be “the power to which the enterprise was to be left” (MW 9: 99). Nature would provide a true education on which to impress the wax tablet of the mind, once humans were “rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions” (MW 9: 98). Rousseau was reacting to schools of his day, institutions of rigid repetition and recitation, designed to discipline and civilize pupils with what Rousseau considered to be the corrupted knowledge of human society. Rousseau’s Emile provides his educational antidote to the coercive social conventions and restrictions of thinking conveyed in school curricula. Emile is a young man educated through the submersion in and free exploration of his physical and natural world, whose gradual exposure to social worlds and institutions would only come after Emile’s senses, body, and mind were strengthened through interactions with his natural world.
In chapter 9 of DE, Dewey will give more careful attention and praise to Rousseau’s educational theory when it comes to the notion of natural development and the aims of education. Dewey’s appreciation for Rousseau’s understanding of educative development there, however, does not extend to Rousseau’s democratic theory as discussed in chapter 7. Dewey has little use for a theory that holds such “unrestrained faith” in the powers of the individual while at the same time holding such contempt for social networks. While the eighteenth-century philosophy brings refreshing new hope in the individual’s powers as compared to the views of Plato, this individualism could not alone meet the democratic criterion in which both common purposes and free association are the means by which individuals create, and are created in, social life. Ultimately, in this chapter Dewey rejects Rousseau’s dualistic interpretations of “nature” and “individual” as inherently pure, and “society” and “social life” as inherently corrupt; such a construction goes directly against Dewey’s notion of the individual in and of society.
Education as National and as Social
This educational theory is the most extensively discussed in this chapter, perhaps because it is the most contemporary of the three, and arguably most influential in his time (as well as in our own). This theory is developed in the era of the rising Western nation-state in which “the realization of the new education destined to produce a new society was […] dependent upon the activities of existing states. The movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered schools” (MW 9: 99). This movement came to dominate state schooling in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; indeed, it served to justify the creation of state school systems across many countries around the world.
Following from the individualistic era of the eighteenth century, in the nationalist period, “the ‘state’ was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form the citizen, not the ‘man,’ became the aim of education” (MW 9: 99–100). The problem with this was that in this transition, the emphasis on individual development was lost and in its place came social efficiency. It ultimately became
impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim of social efficiency. […] Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defence and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development.
Germany is then examined as a case study for this educational theory and context. Dewey writes about the influence of nationalism in Germany’s evolution from Kant to Napoleon. Kant identified education as the process by which man becomes man, or by which humans mature from beings of nature to beings of reason. Yet as Dewey notes here, we tend to educate generations
to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes
The case study of Germany shows us two things, Dewey argues. One is that terms like “individual” and “society” are “quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context” (MW 9: 102). “The conception of education as a social progress and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind” (MW 9: 103). The second point reminds us of the tensions between nationalist and wider social aims. Dewey understood the import of creating citizens, but saw how state school systems too easily began to reflect an isolated set of state interests. Dewey understood that science, the arts, commerce, and human welfare all transcend national boundaries and national interests, all involving “interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time” (MW 9: 103).
On the pervasiveness of nationalism in state schools, Dewey pointedly asks a most contemporary and provocative question: “Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted?” (MW 9: 104).
This question focuses sharply on an important educational dilemma of our time, and I think many educators might answer the question with a disappointed but resounding “no.” Today there are some of the same, as well as a few novel, corruptions in our state school systems as Dewey saw in his time. Corporate power and private money strongly shape educational provision and policy in an increasingly divided society. While Dewey lived in society also sharply divided along race and wealth, and while we have made much progress since 1916, many Western nations like the United States remain sharply, if slightly differently, divided by wealth and along racial-ethnic lines in particular.
Dewey’s question here makes an important point. How can the nation-state be made a partner in providing universal schools, as they have an important stake in educational provision, without narrowing and corrupting the social vision and purposes of education? For Dewey, the answer lies in part with how you view the democratic ideal in education. Schools that are democratic must ultimately be run in ways that engage communities in all their fullness and pluralism. Dewey’s vision of democracy was never one of leaving education to “the experts” such as administrators or school boards, as his views of democracy are participatory and experiential. Dewey says that we can only achieve the democratic ideal when schools adequately “discount the effects of economic inequalities” and help youth become “masters of their own economic and social careers” (MW 9: 104). This can only happen when all the communities of a school and district, and all the social and economic interests are articulated and represented in the school governance, curriculum, and educational experiences on offer in a school.
Summary
Dewey provides a conclusion summarizing his two democratic criteria:
A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.
This summary contains the important concepts of his naturalist vision of democracy – participation, flexible readjustment, and interaction. It contains the provision for social control through social relations and cultivated habits of mind, but also sows the seeds of social reinvention and growth over time by not harnessing the democratic concept with the freight of particular forms, structures, or processes. While his many readers, over time, would challenge this more abstract and organic way of framing democracy, wanting a more concrete, definitive, material reference, Dewey’s genius shows in his ability to connect the human-made concept of democracy with the naturally born processes of growth and development. Dewey well knew that the human world and the so-called natural world were of one piece, so his move to link democracy with the organic was a simple extension of this realization, yet one that would forever mark his democratic ideal as a distinctive, important contribution to democratic theory.
