In chapter 8 Dewey turns to aims in education. Readers may immediately notice that while they have heard about the aims of education, the preposition ‘in’ in the chapter title puts a new twist on the topic. Dewey wants us to attend to how aims actually enter into action in educational settings; he wants to move from theories and dictates about what the ideal ends of education should be to a naturalistic theory of how aims – especially good ones – actually work in education. He offers the outline of a theory of educational aims based on this naturalistic account. This explains the three chapter sections: the nature of aims, the criteria of good aims, and applications in education.
Chapter 8 follows immediately after the chapter on the democratic conception of education. Earlier Dewey had been considering education in a general way. But once we set our sights on education for a democratic society, our understanding of every educational commonplace – teaching, learning, aims, methods, and subject matters – must be reconsidered. So this chapter presents a democratic theory of aims.
Dewey situates educational aims within the context of democratic education by setting up a contest between two ways of approaching aims. As he says, “we are rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and when they are set up from without” (MW 9: 107). This also turns out to be the distinction between democratic and authoritarian aims. “The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them from superior authorities; […] The teachers impose them upon children” (MW 9: 115). This top down approach to educational aims has posed a constant threat to democratic living, in Dewey’s time and even more in our own.
Dewey says that the germ of what he has to say about aims is already contained in the previous chapters of Democracy and Education. He has already argued that living is all one with taking aim-directed action, that individuals learn key lessons simply by taking action in pursuit of aims, and they learn additional lessons when they act cooperatively with others for common aims. He says that if we are going to add explicit school lessons into the learning mix, we must be prepared to say what they add, and we must to the extent possible use these basic methods of learning by doing and cooperating within our lessons (chapter 1); that learning by taking action contains its own implicit direction so we don’t need additional direction from outside (chapter 3); and that the ultimate end of education is the growth in individuals and groups of powers to deal with new situations (chapter 4) so that as they grow they are already “preparing” themselves for what their actual futures will bring – we have no further need to “prepare” them for some future of our own imagination (chapter 5). Now add that we are preparing learners to live in a democratic society, and we have the basis for a democratic theory of educational commonplaces, including a theory of aims.
The Nature of Aims
Nothing could be more familiar to us than aims; living is all one with acting to achieve aims, and we need to make them explicit when engaged in “activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the time succession” (MW 9: 108). Think of two very familiar examples, to which we will return below: (i) a student research project with a term paper and (ii) a family picnic.
(i) A young man, who we will call “Junior,” gets a research paper assignment in his college English history class. The teacher sets some constraints – no more than 3000 words, contains at least ten footnotes, due December 1. Now Junior has to select a topic. He decides to write about Queen Elizabeth I of England. The professor explains that this topic is much too broad: he must narrow it. “Find a clear and simple thesis,” she advises; “so you can zero in on the sorts of materials you will need to support it. If you don’t have a clear aim in your research,” she says, “you won’t know what to look for next.”
(ii) Mom suggests a picnic outing. But many questions about the aim are unanswered: where will we go, what will we bring, how long should we stay, how long will it take to get there? Dad suggests Washington Park, but Sis says she needs to get back by 4 pm to meet a friend. Junior suggests Lincoln Park, which is closer. “It also has nice nice tennis courts.” Mom suggests ham and cheese sandwiches, but Dad offers to bring the grill and make hamburgers. Working together they form a more concrete aim for the picnic. Then they set out to make it work. Junior knows which sports equipment to pack, Dad goes out to shop for ground beef, Mom packs the picnic basket. Each is able to act, and to coordinate with the others, because they are all acting with a common aim.
Aims in vs. Aims of Education: Democratic vs. Authoritarian Control
Dewey, as noted, distinguishes throughout this chapter between aims operating in learning contexts and those imposed from without. The democratic conception, he says, forbids aims imposed from without, because that would imply that some persons or groups have the power and the right to impose on others the direction in which those others are developing. Imposing aims upon education from outside the process and independent of the people acting within the situation is thus the mark of an anti-democratic or authoritarian society.
We can make a similar distinction in the research paper and picnic examples. In the former, junior gets to choose his own topic and pursue it in his own way. He does not get to choose whether to prepare a research paper; he has chosen to attend college, and one of the purposes of college education is to learn to think to some purpose – to gather and synthesize information and to advance ideas in a persuasive fashion. The research project is a setting that serves this purpose. His professor provides constraints (3000 words, ten footnotes, a deadline) and helpful rules for success (narrow your thesis). But she does not impose the aim – the precise topic and iron-clad rules about how to address it. Junior is free to develop the paper as he chooses. In the picnic case, Mom also doesn’t impose the aim – she doesn’t just announce the site, the menu, the activities and the time-frame for the picnic, and order everyone into the car. She sets up a democratic decision-making process where everyone states preferences and negotiates to arrive at an aim everyone has contributed to and shares.
Continuity
When we are speaking of activities “having a time span and cumulative growth within the time succession,” Dewey explains, aims are used to provide foresight and to guide our current actions and choices. Both nature and human life are marked by processes – with beginnings, middles, and endings. Regardless of whether Junior will finish his term paper, the term will end. Regardless of whether the family makes a good plan for the picnic, the afternoon will end. Taking action, however, is about getting results – about getting what we want by the time the ending comes. “Since aims relate always to results,” Dewey says, “the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity” (MW 9: 108).
Where does continuity – one of Dewey’s favorite terms – enter the picture? The aim provides a useful target within the activity, one that we can keep in mind as we organize steps to achieve it. In the term paper project, the aim – 3000 words, ten footnotes, a narrowly formulated thesis, a deadline – gives Junior both a target to hit and continuous guidance as he searches for, selects, and uses reference materials. Junior is building continuously toward a desired result – an acceptable paper – drawing upon his prior knowledge and interests as well as what unfolds in the research process – and his powers are thus growing.
Suppose, however, that instead of a term paper the professor assigned a mere checklist of thirty historical events to be described in two sentences each. “They come from the common core standards and are all going to be on the test,” she says. But what is Junior’s aim in that case? His study activities have no intrinsic continuity – they do not build upon each other toward something larger. They are a “mere serial aggregate of acts […] dictated by the teacher,” and “the only order in the sequence […] comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another” (MW 9: 108). Junior could start at the end or middle of the checklist as well as the beginning, and it would not make any difference. His activity in filling in the checklist is thus not guided by an aim. The work does not build to a result, and Junior is not growing – he is just going through the motions.
“The net conclusion,” Dewey states, “is that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own capacities” (MW 9: 110). Unlike writing a term paper or planning a picnic, filling in a checklist does not require intelligence; it is a mindless activity. It does not build capabilities through taking action, meeting obstacles, and taking further action; it’s just doing the same old thing over and over. In doing so, Junior is being shaped by a force outside of himself, a teacher, a district curriculum committee, or a national commission; he is not becoming a free person, a force in his own development, or a democratic citizen – a force in his community.
Criteria for Good Aims
In the section on criteria for good aims, Dewey appears to be offering a brief handbook for stating aims for the activities of living. But more important, he is further developing his argument against aims imposed from outside life processes. Briefly, he states that good aims (1) must be an outgrowth of existing conditions; they (2) can emerge as no more than a tentative sketch to be developed; and (3) must be suggestive of activities to be done and flexible – capable of alteration to meet circumstances.
In the picnic example, the aim (1) grew out of the conditions existing at home. The family is already gathered together. Mom checks out to see whether everyone has time for a picnic. Sis says she has limited time. That already rules out Washington Park. Then Junior suggests a tennis party, etc. This would only make sense if members of the family already play tennis. The aim (2) started as a tentative sketch – “let’s have a picnic” – but that was sufficient to give rise to a host of questions that led to a more definite aim. The aim was (3) suggestive and flexible from the start – Washington Park may be this family’s favorite picnic spot, but as Sis let everyone knew of her time constraint, Washington Park was eliminated. Then alternatives were freely brought into play, eventuating in an end-in-view shared by all – a cook-out and tennis game – and a freeing of activity as everyone knew which actions to take to move toward the goal.
Externally Imposed Aims
When we switch from aims arising within creative problem solving and goal-directed behavior to aims imposed from the outside, however, difficulties immediately arise.
External ideas about the proper aims of activities directly violate criterion (1) – the aims no longer arise within activity. As a result they end up “foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation,” and the problem becomes to “bring our activities to bear upon the realization of these externally supplied ends” (MW 9: 111). Instead of directing our behavior intelligently, these aims actually limit intelligence:
they are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of the better among alternative possibilities. They limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means
Unlike criterion (2) – the mere tentative sketch of an aim thrown out for elaboration and modification – an externally established aim is always rigid. It is:
not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances.
External aims are also inert and dead, rather than living, flexible, and suggestive as demanded by criterion (3). They are “always conceived of as fixed,” as “something to be attained and possessed” (MW 9: 112, emphasis in original). Such aims also suck the life right out of the activity process, as activity becomes:
a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which is alone worth while.
Here Dewey turns the usual logic of “taking means to an end” on its head. We often think that in taking means to an end, it is the end that is valuable in itself; the means are just unpleasant steps that must be endured to get to the desired end. Think, for example, of a family saving for a summer vacation at the beach. They may think of the vacation as the important thing, and the saving as painful – as scrimping and doing without just to squirrel away enough money for the vacation. We do not have to deny that there are cases like this. But let’s think of our picnic. It is the whole creative adventure, the planning, packing, driving, sharing, and playing together, that has value for the family. The end in view is important not because, for example, the family loves grilled burgers, but because the family uses that end to organize an exciting family picnic day. If burgers were really the valuable something for which the whole day were a mere means, it would be easier and more “efficient” for Dad simply to grill them at home and be done with them. Aims, Dewey is saying, are tools to make life more abundant in the living. Externally imposed aims by contrast suck the abundance out of living and make it a chore.
In short, forcing external ends onto our life processes is anti-democratic and anti-life. External aims limit intelligence – they make us stupid. They require authoritative threat to get individuals to move toward them, because without it, those in the situation would just ignore or resist them. Instead of adding joy, they bleed life dry. By contrast, goals emerging right in the midst of activity free intelligence, are self-motivating, and organize and coordinate our behaviors for our success and enjoyment.Footnote 1
Applications in Education
In section three Dewey simply applies these results to aims in education. There is nothing peculiar about educational aims. They are just like aims in any other activity “having a time span and cumulative growth within the time succession.” The teacher’s aims must, like those of anyone else, grow out of existing conditions, build on tentative sketches, and, by being suggestive and flexible, free teaching and learning activity. That said, some specific applications can be derived:
First, focus on each individual learner. Real living, breathing individual young people are the primary factors in the “existing conditions” of the educational situation, so that a teacher’s aims must always grow out of their specific “intrinsic activities and needs” (MW 9: 114). Too often, educators start with their own cherished ideas or imposed tasks and “set them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated” (MW 9: 115). They also try to impose uniform aims that “neglect the specific powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and place” (MW 9: 115).
Second, cooperate with the forces already at play in the situation. The aim must suggest a way for teachers to cooperate with these “intrinsic activities and needs” of learners rather than suppress them in order to impose preconceived lessons. Young people are already “live creatures” pursuing ends. Teachers can enter their worlds and cooperate and augment their activities, or can “teach” pre-conceived lessons that stop them cold.
Consider the educational situation in the wake of a series of highly publicized police killings of young black people followed by urban protests and riots. In urban classrooms across the country, young people are already actively talking among themselves about how to respond when approached by a policeman, and they feel intensely the need to know how to protect themselves and their peers. In such a case, a teacher who tells the class to “settle down” so she can teach the unit on “the slum” from the textbook “because the material is on the exam” is violating this principle. Such an approach “operates to exclude recognition of everything except what squares up with the fixed end in view” (MW 9: 116).
Third, be specific. Teachers have to be on guard against abstract aims, those “detached from all specific context” (MW 9: 116). Here Dewey is thinking about such aims as “the well-cultured individual” or “emancipation.” The problem with abstract goals is that they are remote from actual conditions, and tend to violate criterion (3) for good goals. That is, instead of aiding freedom and intelligence in activity, abstract aims limit freedom because they make the activity just a means to the end, with no special value in itself. But, as Dewey insists, “no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worthwhile in its own immediate having” (MW 9: 116), that is, unless it is engaging and vitalizing.
Aims in Education after Dewey
Dewey was not writing about educational aims in a vacuum. Even before the turn of the twentieth century, leaders of the American progressive movement had already turned their eye toward alleged inefficiencies in education. The progressives responded to the vast changes in American society brought about by the growth of scientific technology and national corporations, and they called for reforms that would bring older institutions into the new scientific-technological and corporate contexts. In education, administrative progressives called for a scientific approach to schooling that included stating the ends of education in measurable terms to discover the most efficient means.
The scientific management movement in business and industry was a part of the same trend. Taylorism (named for Frederick Winslow Taylor, the scientific management guru) – was a process for analyzing work processes into discrete steps to increase labor productivity and economic efficiency. It reached the peak of its influence in the 1910s when Dewey was writing Democracy and Education, and scientific management consultants were already being employed by school districts.Footnote 2 Thus, the imposition of external aims already had “deep roots.” Dewey was acutely aware that such efforts threatened to de-skill teaching and destroy the professional status of teachers and the democratic character and educational value of schooling.
In the years following the publication of Democracy and Education scientific management gained further headway in education. Just two years after Democracy and Education appeared, John Franklin Bobbitt published his influential book The Curriculum, laying out a five-step process for specifying aims, converting them into measureable objectives, and testing alternative means for achieving them (Bobbitt Reference Bobbitt1918). School districts hired curriculum experts and consultants to develop specific learning aims for every course at every level. Test makers drew on samples of these objectives to construct standardized achievement tests, which became more widely used. Despite the universal praise for Democracy and Education, few educators took to heart Dewey’s democratic theory of educational aims.
In the last four decades, the combination of standardized learning objectives and high-stakes standardized tests – growing out of government mandates from A Nation at Risk to Goals 2000 to No Child Left Behind, Common Core and Race to the Top – has threatened to transform the American schools into test prep academies – with similar developments also taking place in other parts of the world as international comparisons of educational achievement such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) become more widespread. Instead of developing aims out of the existing conditions in their classrooms to facilitate the growth of real individual students, teachers are now required to adopt authoritatively imposed “standards” and “specific learning objectives” – and to submit to “professional assessment” on the basis of their students’ standardized test scores. This school reform project suffers from all of the ills Dewey diagnosed.
One hundred years after it was published, the account of aims in education in Democracy and Education provides us as citizens and educators with the means to re-assess this failed reform regime, to condemn it as miseducative, and perhaps eventually, to move beyond the current authoritarian morass to a more democratic form of education.
