Who Wants Progressive Education? The Influence of John Dewey on the Public Schools

by ALBERT LYND

EUROPEAN domination of American educational theory ended with the nineteenth century. Professor John Dewey, long of I Columbia University but then of the University of Chicago, published The School and Society in 1899. For most of the last half-century the “philosopher of science and freedom" who died in 1952 was the strongest influence upon the New Education in America.

In the history of educational reform, the transition from the romanticism of Rousseau and Pestalozzi to the scientific pragmatism of Dewey is remarkable. More remarkable is the association of Dewey’s name with the current literature of the New Education. Much of it consists of insipid incantations about growth and richness and joy and the rest of the jargon which passes for bold new thinking in neo-pedagogy; a jargon which one professor of philosophy described as a series of “emotive, question-begging words and phrases.”

There is a probable explanation. Much of the writing and speaking on behalf of the New Education is done by persons who understand what is easy to understand, that Mr. Dewey has given them license to chop down something: the traditional curriculum and discipline. Chopping is an occupation many find agreeable; they are less clear about what they should do to replace what they are destroying. Their efforts to make this intelligible in the books and articles which they write for one another may be responsible for most of the inanities of neo-pedagogy.

When some notorious reactionary-by-trade denounces the fundamental pragmatism of Dewey as subversive of traditional religion and of economic liberalism (which it is) the Neo-Educationists rush into print to denounce the pamphleteer’s grubby motives. But a frank defense of pragmatism with a clear statement to the public of what it really implies is not usually included. The writings of Dewey himself and of his disciples (Kilpatrick, Rugg, Bode, and others), in which these statements are to be found, are by their nature not likely to fall in the way of many plain parents and citizens. It is left to pamphleteering bagmen to explain Dewey to a public consisting largely of parents who have an anxious stake in educational theory.

I respect Dewey’s genius and his rugged intellectual integrity. His prose is not fluent, but it has a powerful effect even upon a layman without philosophical pretensions. No matter how far you are from agreement with him, you must admire his systematic pommeling of every trace of what he finds amiss in time-honored systems of ideas. If some of those happen to be ideas which you believe to be important, the experience is like watching someone bludgeon your grandmother while proving to you that she clearly deserves it.

Copyright 1953, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The catch is that there are other eminent philosophers who will expertly rehabilitate your grandmother. The most important question here is not whether Dewey’s views of the nature of man and the universe are right or wrong. That is as you please. But Mr. Dewey’s importance is not lessened by asking: How many parents would agree that his ideas, if they understood them, are those which should determine the formation of their children? And how many communities, if consulted, would be likely to approve a philosophy which is plainly uncongenial to certain loyalties which most plain nonphilosophizing people hold, for better or worse, to be important: belief in supernaturalism, in a transcendent natural law, in the immutability of certain moral principles?

In my experience with such discussions, this is the point at which a New Educationist may forget his theoretical devotion to democracy: he may rush in with the statement that “ordinary people" are not competent judges of philosophical or educational theory. That may be true, but it begs the next question: If we must have one dominant philosophical influence upon the reform of our schools, who voted for Dewey? There are many competing philosophies which enjoy intellectual (and democratic) respectability today. How did one philosophy acquire in lower education a dominance quite out of proportion to its standing — considerable as it is — among professional philosophers? And fantastically out of proportion to popular agreement with its basic principles?

Dewey’s great influence upon American education is usually explained by his disciples on the ground that his philosophy is peculiarly congenial to the spirit of American democracy. That is not wholly convincing: the argument is circular, because it includes conceptions of democracy which are themselves a part of Mr. Dewey’s philosophy. His authority is more probably explainable as an historical accident; he was the only first-rate American philosopher to take an intense, evangelical interest in the lower schools. For our graduates in Education who are uneducated in anything but their own trade, Dewey is to the American school what Aristotle was to the medieval school: simply “the Philosopher.” His name is used as a charm within the profession and an exorcism without. This is an interesting fate for the century’s most consistent foe of dogmatism

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DEWE’S educational theories are consistently related to his basic philosophical views. What are those views? We have a problem here. Any attempt to reduce to capsule explanations a complex set of ideas will certainly irritate its professional expounders, and with some reason, because oversimplification entails the risk of misrepresentation. But it should be even more irritating to a parent to be told that without technical philosophical training he cannot expect to understand the ideas which may be influencing the formation of his children. The following is simply a layman’s distillation of Mr. Dewey’s key ideas from those of his works which come nearest to general circulation. For my inadequacy here I apologize only to Mr. Dewey and to any Neo-Educationist who has made an effort to present a more competent popular exposition of the philosophy which determines his educational views.

Mr. Dewey’s philosophy is usually called instrumentalimn.

The implication is that knowledge is not merely the descriptive information acquired by the viewer of a scene; rather it is something which is begotten and exercised in action and which is an instrument for more intelligent action. Instrumentalism is a development of the pragmatism of William James. The essential principle of pragmatism is that the test of truth in a proposition is not in its source, but in “how it works.”The following points are prominent in Dewey’s thought: —

There are no eternal truths. From the beginning of intellectual history, men have argued about the truth or falsity of countless propositions, but they were usually agreed that there is such a thing as absolute truth. for Dewey, as for James, striving for immutable truth is futile. Dewey goes beyond James in elaborating the pragmatic principle through every area of philosophical concern, in relating it to modern experimental science, and in applying it to social problems.

The Deweyan theory of knowledge turns on an insistence that the old Greek dualism of mind and body is false. Man is wholly a biological organism. The mind does not learn or know as a spectator; rather, knowledge results from the interaction of the human organism with the environment. In this “continuum of experience” a human being is inextricably involved with other persons and things; the act of knowing something also means effecting certain changes in the environment with which the human organism is continuous. If the change is for the better — that is, if it carries out the purpose for which the “inquiry” was launched — the knowledge acquired is “true” in the only sense in which the achievement of truth is possible.

The only test for truth in an idea, therefore, is in its consequences in the life activities to which it leads. The only way of intelligently testing and controlling those consequences is through the method of experimental science. If the consequences of a proposition are good, the idea may have “warranted assertability. Of course the problem “what is good?” is a serious one in this as in every philosophy; Mr. Dewey deals with it at length in his ethical works. In general he considers it in relation to social ends.

Truth, or warranted assertabilily, is always relative, because the consequences of an idea may change with time or place. This necessarily follows from the doctrine that thinking or knowing always means involvement of the organism with the environment. Since the environment —natural, social, technological — is in constant change, the consequences of any activity involved with it are subject to change.

The search for knowledge must be continuous and arduous, but it is not, as in most older systems of philosophy, an aspiration toward any “ultimate reality” in the universe. It is a search for principles which will “work” here and now in a changing context; and there is no other way of getting them than through the experimental method. In the physical and natural sciences, all discoverable facts about a problem are collected, and explanations of them are tested by experiment. The simplest explanation which will account for all of them is set up as a “hypothesis,” avowedly tentative and subject to change if new data should render it inadequate. The hypothesis is “true" to the extent that its consequences are favorable for furthering the investigation. That, according to Dewey, is the only kind of knowledge we can have about anything.

Many scientists who follow the scientific method within their specialties do not carry it through to their general view of live universe. Deweyites are critical not only of scientists who “go religious" outside their laboratories, but even of mathematicians and theoretical physicists who seek to fit the “gross facts” of observation to mathematically derived abstractions, instead of proceeding in the contrary direction.

Dewey is not a “materialist" if that word means one who believes in the finality of any alleged truth. The philosophy of the man who believes he has hold of absolute truth in the statement that “there is no reality except matter" is not more acceptable to Dewey than that of the man who says that “there is a personal God.”But since Dewey does not readily concede “warranted assertabilily" to any proposition not in some way verifiable by the scientific method, he excludes supernaturalism as practically as did the old-fashioned dogmatic materialist.

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There is no mind or “soul" in the traditional sense. This, if anything, is the key doctrine of Deweyism. Most previous philosophy, Dewey believes, has been infected by a double error of the Greeks: that there is some perfect or “ultimate" reality in the universe, and that it is discoverable by the use of a special intellectual faculty. Dewey finds no evidence in man of a nonmaterial faculty which thinks, or which can be filled up with knowledge like a tank or a sponge. Nor is there a soul which is immortal or otherwise distinguishable from the body. Man is an organism engaged in an instinctive effort to adapt itself to the environment. There are many difficulties, many problems to be solved in this effort. Thinking, in Dewey’s meaning of “inquiry,” is one kind of effort to solve these problems, as walking is another. Intelligence grows in action and seeks to go beyond adaptation to control of the environment.

Mental activity like physical activity (the distinction is merely verbal) proceeds through habits developed by the organism in its relations with the environment. There is no life in the organism apart from such interaction. You cannot breathe without air, walk without a surface, talk without sound waves, or see without looking at something. Nor can you think without a similar interaction of your organism with things external to it, though these may be transferred to and distorted in the imagination. Thinking is like seeing. Sight is not something “in” the body; it is an event which occurs when the body is involved in a certain way with something else. In the same way, mind is not “in me.” Mind is not a separate something which acts upon objects of thought. Like sight, mind is an activity which occurs when the organism interacts with the environment in a certain way. In Dewey’s phrase, “mind is primarily a verb.”

Mr. Dewey’s view of the mind is critically important in his educational theories. The process of learning, for him, is not the accumulation of a mental stock of information. It is the acquisition by the organism of certain habits. Children are not born with minds. They acquire habits, including those of thought, which are not different in mode of origin from other habits. But their relations with the environment would be unbearably rigid and survival would be difficult if all activity had to be that of habit. Living is possible because habits are subject to modification; they are made flexible by impulses. The relation of impulse to habit varies greatly among individuals; it is a key to character and the proper concern of education.

Since there is no mind or thought apart from environmental interaction, it follows that there is no such thing as a soul or even a “self" which can exist (and be educated) apart from its own experiences. Man is continuous with the rest of nature, including the rest of mankind. The problem of environmental adjustment is so largely a social problem that the development of desirable social habits and the release of socially useful impulses area most important responsibility of educators.

Man’s efforts toward environmental adaptation include the development of mental and “spiritual" habits—that is, ideas or beliefs. These are not essentially different from the physical adaptations of the organism. There is nothing absolute or perfect or final about any of them. Some of them are better and some are worse for our purposes in our struggle for adaptation to and control of the environment.

There are no fixed moral laws. This follows from the foregoing. For centuries, Dewey believes, men wasted energy and confused themselves by efforts to find in religion or philosophy a set of immutable moral truths to which human nature should be made to conform. In most of the older religious traditions human nature was viewed with suspicion and subjected to efforts to make it behave properly in relation to some transcendental ideal. Dewey insists that human nature itself is the only source of workable moral guides. He believes that the effort to find transcendental moral rules has been doubly wrong — wrong in fact, because there is no known deity or “higher” reality whence such principles may be derived; and wrong in effect, because the effort to enforce that kind of moral law has separated the sphere of our present morality from the most important human activities in politics, economics, and other social relationships.

The wisdom or unwisdom of a moral rule, according to Dewey, depends upon its consequences in the activities it creates. The scientific method is the only proper procedure for establishing moral codes, as it is for obtaining any kind of knowledge. All the relevant data of individual and social psychology, of sociology, economics, and technology, as well as the natural sciences, must be applied to the problems of human behavior. We must, indeed, have principles and we must develop habits of conformity to them. But principles can never be absolute or final; they should be bench marks of our progress in scientific morality. They are subject to change, with due caution, for thoroughly investigated reasons. Both the principles themselves and the aptitude for changing them when necessary should be properly related to our twin engines of habit and impulse.

There is nothing “lax” about Dewey’s proposed morality of human nature. He was a rather austere person in his own life, and he expected a high standard of behavior in others. He also wanted to preserve what he regarded as the real values in traditional religious sentiment. His famous work A Common Faith is a plea for the release of those values from their involvement in what he regards as ancient superstitions and reactionary religious institutions, that they may be of modern service in a kind of noninstitutional religion of humanity.

Human happiness is the consistent aim of Dewey’s moral theory, as he does not believe there is any future existence in which the sorrows and inequities of this life may be redressed. But he is scornful of ethical short cuts and oversimplifications, such as the illusory emancipation of the “Bohemian” who would seek freedom from convention through slavery to passion. He believes that the present maldistribution of happiness and suffering can be alleviated by educational strengthening of habits of coöperation and generosity, and the liberation of impulses to the same ends. Our present faulty social habits are fixed in inequitable institutions of government and property and the like. Better habits will make better institutions, not vice versa.

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Democracy is a moral value. Mr. Dewey was the acknowledged philosopher of democracy as well as of science, but his definition goes beyond the limited political meaning. It derives from the assumption of the worth of each human being, but this is not for him a truth dependent upon a unique creation or a supernatural destiny of man. Nor can Dewey accept the older philosophical idea of “natural rights" to the extent that it was dependent upon a notion of immutable natural law. His assertion of human value is validated by the consequences which flow from it in action.

Democracy is a moral value because it is the social order which encourages each individual to make the most effective use of his powers for living with maximum satisfaction; or in the scientific view, to achieve the most successful relationship of the organism to its environment. Since the environment is so largely social, this adjustment cannot be achieved for individuals without social effort — that is, without the development of strong habits of coöperation.

Most persons, including irreconcilable critics of pragmatism, will concede that the pragmatic case for democracy is a strong one. Anyone can see that the consequences of freedom will be desirable for himself, and no philosophical profundity is required for the further seeing that he will be most secure in the enjoyment of freedom under a social system which assures it for the other fellow.

In practice Dewey’s altitudes put him definitely to the left of center, particularly in his suspicion of big business and in his willingness to see economic inequities reduced by political action. This willingness, however, is conditioned by the Dewey an view that there can be no comprehensive institutional change without a change of habits through educat ion.

Dewey is not a Marxist. His philosophy is quite inconsistent with the “dialectic" of Marxian theory. Nor can Dewey, with his views of human nature and conduct, share the Marxian expectation of extensive social change primarily through political or revolutionary action. For many readers of Dewey, the transfer of the Russian people by revolution from one tyranny to another is striking confirmation of the accuracy of his analysis of the social psychology of habit.

Dewey had no truck with Communism. His philosophy is so definitely hostile to the Marxian orthodoxy of Lenin and Stalin that the efforts of an occasional reactionary pamphleteer to link him with Communism are the work of malice or ignorance. Dewey was opposed to the Soviet enterprise because he is philosophically opposed to all absolutes, and most vehemently to those which furnish pretexts for the curbing of freedom. His views are clearly on record, and more: the Communists devoted to him their bitterest invective when he undertook in 1937 the leadership of an enterprise devoted to exposing the Stalinist frame-up of Trotsky.

But, despite this anti-Communism, there is no aid or comfort in Deweyism for the believer in free economic enterprise. The only revolution which Dewey endorses is that which will operate through educational change of habits and impulses, but the kind of society toward which he wants this change to operate is definitely a species of socialism, different as it may be from that of Marxian orthodoxy. Deweyism is no more acceptable to one who believes in economic liberalism than to one who believes in supernaturalism.

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Pragmatism justifies Progressive Education. Dewey’s basic philosophical assumptions are more than well hinged to his educational doctrines. For example, his rejection of the traditional distinction of mind and body is an indispensable assumption. I believe this should be held in mind by parents who are assured by Educationists that progressivist methods can stand alone, on psychological justification, without reference to Deweyan pragmatism. That assertion merely invites a question about the kind of psychology used by the Educationist.

Progressivism is logically consistent with instrumentalist philosophy right down the line. If there are no absolutes in the history of ideas, it is of course quite sensible to throw out of our schools much of the lore of the past. If the “warranted assertability” of any idea depends upon the environmental context, which is constantly changing, there are few ideas of the distant past which retain that title today, if they ever had it. If human behavior depends upon patterns of habit and impulse, as Dewey believes, instruction by exhortation is largely useless. A school program related to the view of man as a monistic biological organism should involve the student in lively activities around the solution of problems of living which most clearly beset him. And if habits alone are not enough (since rigidity of habit explains many present social ills), the program should also provide for the liberation of impulses useful for making habits flexible.

The Deweyan educational reform proposes to manage intelligently an educational process which — if Dewey is right — operates inevitably whether we heed it or not. He believes that moral and other instruction of the hortatory type has never been really effective, that we have always been educated through habit formation. In Dewey’s view, the habits most of us have now were forced upon us during infancy and childhood when we were physically dependent upon adults. They are our elders’ habits. Habits have changed from one generation to another, thanks to the changing environment and the modification of habit by impulse. But the older process of change was haphazard and irrational. According to Dewey, it left unshaken too many habits which perpetuate social inequities. Or very occasionally, it shook them too violently in those upheavals called revolutions. Intelligent management of the habit and impulse patterns in youth is the rationale of progressive education. It explains those classroom practices (at their best) with which most parents are familiar, including those practices which have provoked caricature.

Viewing Dewey’s educational theories in philosophical perspective disposes of many superficial arguments about the New Education. Take the argument about whether Latin is “good” for youngsters. If there are any ethical or esthetic absolutes in human experience, the stately moral exhortations of Cicero and the poetic beauty of Vergil certainly bring us close to the best of them. But if there are not, the preachments of an ancient Roman may be a waste of time. And reading Vergil may consume energy better used in developing habits of esthetic appreciation (for example, in interior decorating) more directly related to problems of suburban living today. If there is little use in reading those authors, there is no use for any but future specialists in the laborious learning of Latin. But the main argument depends upon the preliminary ifs.

What is the practical effect of Deweyism on the curriculum? Well, here is an evidence of its effect in its most extreme form. The following is a statement by an enthusiastic disciple of Dewey, Samuel Tenenbaum, the biographer of William Heard Kilpatrick, who spent a long lifetime indoctrinating prospective teachers with Deweyism: —

“The writer has seen a class of six hundred and more graduate students in education, comprising teachers, principals, superintendents, vote their opinion in overwhelming numbers that Greek, Latin and mathematics offered the least likely possibilities for educational growth; and with almost the same unanimity they placed dancing, dramatics and doll playing high on the list in this regard.” (Italics mine.)

Admittedly this is extreme, but it is the logical end point of the New or Deweyan Education. A curriculum which has been heavily Deweyized is one which is built around the “real needs” or “felt needs” of the pupils. However, any definition of human “needs” necessarily involves some philosophical assumption about the nature of man, of society, of the universe. The argument of Progressive Education versus Traditional Education does not turn on the merits of doll playing versus Latin grammar. It turns on the question: Are there any “constants” in human thought? Are there any absolutes in ethics? Are there any immutable principles of anything?

Agreement with the basic philosophy of Mr. Dewey is the logical price of agreement with his educational theories. The progressive school enthusiast who wants the second without the first is entitled to like what he likes and to be as illogical as he chooses, but his enthusiasm may be no more than an eagerness to be in fashion.

You may happily agree with all of Mr. Dewey’s basic ideas. But how many parents in your town would join in your agreement if they understood them? Would you say 51 per cent? I should say about 5 per cent or less in my town. You may have no objection to a “shift,” as Bode puts it, “from a morality of cosmic sanction to a morality of social sanction, from morality with a fixed content to morality which varies with conditions and circumstances as determined by empirical investigation.

. . . ” (Italics in the original.) But how many members of your P.T.A. would join in your acceptance of this ethical doctrine if they understood it? Not many. Most people in my town and yours really believe that their ethical intuitions have some cosmic anchor. And of course a great many teachers, probably most of them, believe the same. That may be reassuring for those parents who do not find Mr. Dewey an acceptable mentor for their children’s schools. But it is a reassurance which depends precariously upon the kind of teacher who does not really know what he is doing.

Despite Dewey’s own unquestioned intellectual stature and integrity, his educational doctrines have opened in our schools a door wide enough to admit a legion of pedagogical boondoggles. Precisely because Progressive Education dispenses so far with tradition and stakes so much upon the educational creativity of the teacher, it is a method which would require someone like a Dewey in every classroom for intelligent execution. In actuality, by the testimony of their own vapid utterances, the typical graduates in Education today are the least fitted group in the community to assume the responsibility for re-creating its cultural aspirations.

But there is also political quackery in the new pedagogy. In their constant use of the word “democracy,” the educational interpreters of Dewey are evading the first and most fundamental implication of the word: the will of the community. There is an implication here and there in Dewey’s writings which becomes explicit and vociferous in the writings of some of his disciples: that disagreement with his philosophy will usually be inspired by “social" motives. Unquestionably the Deweyite can turn up evidences of opposition based on nothing more than a conservative fear of change on the part of bishops and bankers and the like who tremble for the institutions which have served them. But Mr. Dewey’s philosophy would be much more widely opposed — if it were more widely understood — for reasons more important than the apprehensions of the chief beneficiaries of the status quo.

Most people are suspicious of pragmatism, not because they fear its effect upon their interests, but because they believe it to be flatly wrong. If their reasons for thinking so are less profound than a philosopher’s, if they are based on rather simple loyalties which should now be outmoded, then let Mr. Dewey’s interpreters engage in a forthright effort to enlighten the adults of my town and others on the blessings of instrumentalism. And this author will join in a Voltairian effort (apocryphal or not) to defend to the death their right to do so. But it is not their right, in the meantime, to slip into the schools of the community a philosophy of education which, if understood, would be rejected by the great majority of the people to whom the schools belong. That is a travesty of “democracy.” Of course the will of the majority has no meaning over against “truth,” but the sanction of fixed truth is the very one which the pragmatist, by definition, cannot invoke.

I am opposed to the substantial teaching of religion in the public schools because the American people have so many gods that none could be served in public education without slighting others. At the same time, and for the same reason, I am opposed to a philosophy of education which takes for granted the falsity of all gods. A nonreligious curriculum may and should be quite compatible with an attitude of sincere respect for all religions. The philosophy of Professor Dewey is categorically incompatible with such an attitude. Even those who take satisfaction in the enormous influence of John Dewey sometimes admit that his philosophy has not been very clearly comprehended. If it had been, there might have been some misgivings. You know your neighbors. How many of them would vote for Deweyism if they understood the philosophical ballot?

In the May Atlantic Frederick Ernst, Deputy Superintendent of the New York Public Schools, will reaffirm the benefits in the school curriculum which have stemmed directly from Dewey’s philosophy.