Book Review: Philosophy of Education

Title: Philosophy of Education

Author: John Dewey

Date: 1946, 1958, 1971

Publisher: Philosophical Library (1946), Littlefield Adams & Co. (1958, 1971)

ISBN: none

Length: 308 pages plus index

Quote: “Some educators suppose they are rendering a service by insisting upon an in­herent difference between studies they call liberal and others they call mechanical and utilitarian.”

Nobody would read Dewey’s Philosophy of Education for pleasure. An academic audience may demand a technical and specialized style of writing, but there are writers, like C.S. Lewis or Noam Chomsky, who can be read for pleasure even when they’re being technical. John Dewey was not one of the blessed few. I suppose age, culture, and temperament might give some readers different reactions from mine—being a middle-aged American “ear thinker” I kept losing the thread of Dewey’s thoughts because his words persistently seemed to be trying to fit themselves into an old jingle from the “Electric Company” educational television program, because every fifth or sixth word in several sentences ends in “-ation”—but I can’t imagine anyone ever returning to this book with the pleasure one might have in rereading The Abolition of Man every ten years.

I mention this partly because the college at which I took teacher-training courses was sectarian enough to teach a course called “Philosophy of Christian Education.” The document studied, similar in bulk to the 1971 (paperback) edition of Philosophy of Education but shorter, was Ellen White’s Education. There was some wailing about Mrs. White’s turgid writing style. Why mince words? It was bad...but Dewey’s was worse.

Nevertheless this was the book that shaped the twentieth century’s ideas of what public schools ought to be and do; and, as left-wingers like Hillary Rodham Clinton are beginning to abandon the name of “liberal” to more independent thinkers, like me, and reclaim their true colors as “progressives,” it may be worthwhile for younger readers to reacquaint themselves with the writings that originally defined the difference between a liberal and a progressive. John Dewey was a progressive, and in this book he makes his case for progressivism.

In fact the only problem I can find with his case for progressivism is the problem I have with all progressivist thinking. It does not match the historical facts. Dewey simply assumed that the American working class felt oppressed by the capitalism into which the original, or real, liberalism had degenerated, to the degree that hordes of American workers would soon be waving red flags and howling for revolution. If those hypothetical American Communists weren’t appeased, they were going to take over! Whereas in fact, although the workers were demanding better wages and working conditions, they actually admired capitalism and capitalists, wanted to become capitalists, and objected vigorously to many of the government programs the progressives thought the workers ought to want. The changes the workers actually wanted were much more modest than what Dewey and his fellow believers thought would be necessary to offer as compromises.

That American workers would even be attracted to the same ideas as Russian and Chinese workers turned out to have been merely a speculation in the minds of foreigners. In reality the American working class never believed in Communism, demanded the right not to join labor unions, do not want to be protected from the vagaries of the free market by expert planning, rejected socialized medical care, like to boast about how strenuous and/or dangerous their jobs are, and are about as likely as not to choose fewer twelve-hour work days over more eight-hour work days. The most successful attempts to opt out of Social Security have been made by the working class; the school choice movements in several states originated in the working class. And the bilingual American working class reserve the right to despise the mental laziness of monoglots, but most of them would rather practice their English than keep on teaching us their languages forever.

It’s ironic that Dewey began, on page 35, paying homage to classically liberal ideas. “The meaning of democracy...was expressed by Abraham Lincoln when he said that no man was good enough or wise enough to govern others without their consent...A woman told me once that she asked a very well-known American statesman what he would do for the people...He said, ‘...look people over and decide what it was that they needed and then try and give it to them.’ She said, ‘...There are people that would ask other people what they wanted before they tried to give it to them.’” And yet the people who would ask others what they wanted have been so signally lacking in the American left wing...

Dewey correctly charges the original liberal thinkers, the ones who felt that everyone has an absolute right to swing per arms right up to the point at which per neighbor’s nose begins, with negligence in allowing illiberal greedheads to enact protectionist legislation that kept smaller competitors out of the market. The capitalist market ceases to be free when big businesses, or even large “professional associations,” are allowed to set up “standards of service” that do not actually protect the customer from anything but merely protect the bigger investors from having to compete with typically more efficient smaller investors. And it would be very interesting, if John Dewey were still alive, to ask him what he now thinks about the fact that although there are some genuinely liberal left-wingers, e.g. Jim Hightower, who are still concerned about these capitalist encroachments on the free market, most left-wingers are not.

Part of the problem in any political party is of course simple greed and venality: so long as a country can support a bloated government, left-wingers can hope for sinecures in that bloated government. Another part is deep philosophical confusion. In the course of Philosophy of Education Dewey works his way around to an assertion that “the ends which liberalism has always pro­fessed can be attained only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals” on page 125. By page 299 he’s lashing out against Christianity so frantically that he rejects “the individual or singular nature of the subject of sin” in some remarkably turgid rants. “It took more than the undeniable but negative fact of the gradual attenuation and decay of the importance once attached to the soul...to effect an adequate elimination,” apparently of the belief that people have individual souls or personalities. “There are, in short, such things as enjoyments and sufferings which are ‘private’ in occurrence...the privacy of enjoyments and sufferings in their occurrence seems to describe a social fact,” Dewey temporizes on page 305. Earlier in the book he has acknowledged that every person does at least know more than other people about where the person’s own shoes pinch, but by page 305 Dewey has worked himself into a corner and can’t seem to stop. “[T]he dentist probably knows the nature of toothache...better than does the one who has it...[W]ere our techniques further advanced, nerve-graftings might enable me to feel or have a toothache whose immediate locus is in the jaw of your head.”

This book offers no reading pleasure, but it’s a good book to have read, once, and to keep around for reference, if you want to understand the origins of the fundamental insanity in the public school system. Some of the ancient Hebrews, we are told, whined for the better selection of food they had had as slaves in Egypt. They did not want to be "free" to starve. But the progressives have degenerated a step further than those ancient Hebrews. Even when the food is better in freedom, they want to be slaves. A hundred years later, that the American working class vigorously rejected everything associated with the Russian Revolution makes no difference to the progressives. They are too attached to the idea of applying solutions that won't work to problems that have corrected or at least replaced themselves. Their sacred scriptures tell them that the corrective to capitalist abuses must be socialist abuses, and they carry on whining for socialist abuses just as if none of the hundred years since Dewey's time had ever happened.