Table Of ContentTHE NEW SCHOLARSHIP ON DEWEY
Edited by
Jim Garrison
Reprinted from Studies in Philosophy and Education,
Volume 13, Nos. 3-4, 1994/95
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Llbrarv of Congress Catalog1ng-ln-Publ1catlon Data
The new scholarship on Dewey I edlted by Jl~ Garrlson.
p. CII.
ISBN 978-0-7923-3446-0 ISBN 978-94-011-0071-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-0071-7
1. Dewey, John, 1859-1952. I. Garrison, Jalles W., 1949-
B945.D44N47 1995
191--dc20 95-8387
ISBN 978-0-7923-3446-0
Printed an acid-free paper
Caver: This bust of John Dewey was sculpted by Alexander Portnoff, a Philadelphia artist,
in the early nineteen thirties. It stands in Judd HaU at the University of Chicago. Two
other copies are known to have been cast but their present locations are unknown.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
JIM GARRISON / Introduction: Education and the New Scholarship
on John Dewey
JOHN J. HOLDER / An Epistemological Foundation for Thinking:
A Deweyan Approach 7
PHILIP W. JACKSON / If We Took Dewey's Aesthetics Seriously,
How Would the Arts Be Taught? 25
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN / Popular Art and Education 35
STEVEN A. FESMIRE / Educating the Moral Artist: Dramatic
Rehearsal in Moral Education 45
SIEBREN MIEDEMA / The Beyond in the Midst: The Relevance of
Dewey's Philosophy of Religion for Education 61
THOMAS M. ALEXANDER / Educating the Democratic Heart:
Pluralism, Traditions and the Humanities 75
J.E. TILES / Education for Democracy 93
GERT BlESTA / Pragmatism as a Pedagogy of Communicative
Action 105
MARY LEACH / (Re)searching Dewey for Feminist Imaginaries:
Linguistic Continuity, Discourse and Gossip 123
JAMES D. MARSHALL / On What We May Hope: Rorty on
Dewey and Foucault 139
RAYMOND D. BOISVERT / John Dewey: An "Old-Fashioned"
Reformer 157
CRAIG A. CUNNINGHAM I Dewey's Metaphysics and the Self 175
SUSAN LAIRD / Rethinking "Coeducation" 193
LARRY A. HICKMAN / Science Education for a Life Curriculum 211
SABRi BUYUKDUVENCi / John Dewey's Impact on Turkish
Education 225
Biography of Contributors 233
Introduction: Education and the New Scholarship on
John Dewey
JIM GARRISON
303 WMH, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0313, U.S.A.
A new scholarship on John Dewey has emerged among academic philosophers
in the last decade. Many of these essays are by those philosophers most respon
sible for creating this new scholarship. Contributors to this volume are distrib
uted evenly between philosophy department faculty and philosophers in colleges
of education. Many on both faculties have experienced the frustration of trying
to convince their colleagues that they often seriously misunderstand and misap
ply Dewey, or that he has anything to say to the so-called postmodem age. This
is the first collection to bring together the philosophers that have framed the new
scholarship with Deweyan scholars in schools of education eager to evaluate,
extend, and apply it. The result is what I call "Education and the New Scholar
ship on John Dewey."
So, what is the new scholarship, and what is its relation to issues in educa
tion? The best way to find out is to read these essays as well as other works by
the authors collected here.' One theme of the new scholarship especially well
represented in this volume is the tendency to place Dewey's aesthetics at the
center of his thinking instead of his theory of inquiry, theory of democratic
social relations, or even his philosophy of education. If the new scholarship's
emphasis on Dewey's aesthetics is correct, then we will need to reconsider our
understanding of the remainder of his holistic philosophy. Communication, cre
ativity, democratic community, religion, and gender are just some of the aspects
of Dewey's educational philosophy that these essays reexamine from the per
spective of the new scholarship.
Many contributors "(re )search," to use Mary Leach's refreshing locution,
review, and reconstruct Dewey's philosophy for their own contemporary pur
poses. Those who think that Dewey, the philosopher of reconstruction, would
reject the idea that his own thought would require reconstruction to better
respond to the vicissitudes of new times and contexts simply fail to grasp one of
Dewey's most important messages.
Several of the authors say something that positions Dewey in one posture or
another regarding the "postmodem" and "poststructualist" critiques of moder
nity advanced by such thinkers as Theodor Adomo, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
especially Michel Foucault, as well as the self-styled "postmodem bourgeois
liberal" pragmatist Richard Rorty. Dewey usually, but not always, gets the better
of the juxtapositioning. Deweyan pragmatism is contrasted with critical theory
as well, especially the work of Habennas. What remains to do, for the reader
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Studies in Philosophy and Education 13: 169-174, 1994/95.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Puhlishers.
170 JIM GARRISON
intrigued enough to have come this far, is to provide short expositions of the
contents of each contribution.
John J. Holder starts us off well in his "An Epistemological Foundation for
Thinking: A Deweyan Approach." This paper addresses issues of immense
importance to philosophers and educators. Holder provides a Deweyan critique
of the epistemology of the fonns of cognitivism currently dominant in the field
of education. The core of the critique is that pure cognitivism must construct a
false dualism between creative thinking and rational thinking. Holder uses
Thomas M. Alexander's notion of "naturalistic emergentism" to connect Dewey
to some of the most exciting current research on lhinking. The result is a natural
istic epistemology that establishes continuity between the noncognitive back
ground of Dewey's theory of thinking (e.g., "qualitative thought," needs,
emotion, habit, and imagination) with the more familiar cognitive foreground.
Holder concludes with specific implications for educational research that empha
size the role of imagination in both rational thinking and creative thinking.
Philip W. Jackson's essay, "If We Took Dewey's Aesthetics Seriously, How
Would the Arts Be Taught?" takes up Dewey's notions about qualitative thought,
imagination, feeling, and reflection, and relates them directly to questions about
teaching and the curriculum. Jackson makes the case that aesthetics and arts
education, with their emphasis on creativity and expressiveness, may be more
basic than the so-called basics of E. D. Hirsch that emphasize rote memoriza
tion. The argument holds if you believe that thinking is basic to education.
Others in this volume make similar claims against Mortimer Adler and Alan
Bloom, as well as Hirsch. Like Holder, Jackson is influenced by Dewey's insight
that feelings, imagination, and art need not fall into a romanticist or subjectivist
framework. At the same time Jackson asserts that aesthetic education can be rig
orous, objective, and disciplined without confonning to the rigid structures of
today's Discipline-Based-Art-Education.
In his "Popular Art and Education," Richard Shustennan reviews and recon
structs Dewey's aesthetics to analyze and legitimate popular art as having pow
erful social and political as well as aesthetic significance. Shustennan is a social
meliorist about popular art fonns. Acknowledging their flaws and abuses he
believes the popular arts have great merit and will improve with careful aesthetic
criticism. The function of philosophy for Dewey was cultural criticism. Richard
does Deweyan critique and reconstruction with and on Dewey to serve social
melioristic functions. One thing he ameliorates is the self-alienation we feel
when we take pleasure in some culturally devalued art fonn. His belief is
that criticism of all kinds, and not just aesthetic criticism, can help provide the
social preconditions necessary for proper appreciation and melioration. Like
Dewey, Shustennan denies any sharp separation between theory and practice.
Recognizing that philosophical argument and critical demonstration of value
alone will not actualize concrete social and cultural refonns, he feels that the
popular arts must find their way into our school's curriculum and modes of
teaching. That, as he clearly states, is why he wrote for a collection of essays on
education.
2
INTRODUCTION 171
As the title "Educating the Moral Artist: Dramatic Rehearsal in Moral Edu
cation" indicates, Steven A. Fesmire is eager to explore the relationships
between the new scholarship's emphasis on Dewey's aesthetics, and the domain
of moral education. Fesmire's paper is a fine example of how the new scholar
ship discloses significant but overlooked ideas in Dewey's philosophy that
require educators to reconsider how they understand and apply him. The notion
that the morally educated individuals are "moral artist," (i.e., those able to
understand and respond to their own unique needs and aspirations as well as
those of others, challenges the tired conventions of moral education as merely
memorizing maxims and blindly obeying rules.
In his "The Beyond in the Midst: The Relevance of Dewey's Philosophy of
Religion for Education," Siebren Miedema examines the sadly neglected topic
of Dewey's philosophy of religion and its connection to his philosophy of educa
tion. Miedema begins by emphasizing what he calls the "intersubjectivist tum"
in both the critical-pragmatist and critical-theorist (e.g., Habermas) philosophi
cal perspectives. Using recent studies on Dewey's philosophy of religion and
Hans Joas' Deweyan critique of Habermas, Miedema argues that, unlike the
critical theorist, the Deweyan pragmatist has valuable things to say to those
interested in religious education. Siebren connects Joas' critique, with its focus
on creativity, to Thomas A. Alexander's work on Dewey's aesthetics and its
relation to the creation of the ideals of action that for Dewey had religious
significance.
In his "Educating the Democratic Heart: Pluralism, Traditions and the
Humanities," Thomas M. Alexander argues that, contrary to scientistic interpre
tations of Dewey, democratic education needs to be humanistic and aesthetic. An
aesthetic vision of the world for Alexander involves the existential "need to
experience meaning and value in an aesthetic, concrete manner." He calls this
passionate quest the "Human Eros." The repeated emphasis on creativity in
these papers should indicate to the reader that these Deweyans do not consider
aesthetics and art education to be just about appreciating pretty pictures and
poems, although they are about that also. That creativity has disappeared from
the dialogue concerning education in our modem democracies is simply a sad
statement about those republics and their schools. Alexander would restore heart
to schools at all levels by restoring humanistic and aesthetic values. He seeks to
accomplish such a restoration without following the political or religious conser
vatives like Mortimer Adler and Alasdair MacIntyre, or those indifferent or
hostile to science, like many of the champions of hermeneutics. Instead,
Alexander wants to defend humanism, cultural pluralism, and intelligent social
inquiry as integral to the democratic tradition.
J. E. Tiles takes up and continues the discussion of democratic education in
his "Education for Democracy." Tiles begins with Matthew Lipman's philoso
phy for children in Hawai'i. Tiles is impressed by the project's emphasis on com
munity, student participation, inquiry, and especially the idea of a disciplined
conversation that has focus, succeeds in scratching beneath the surface, is chal
lenging, interesting, and promotes pupils listening to each other carefully. Tiles
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172 JIM GARRISON
shows why philosophy as Dewey conceived it, that is, not just as subject matter
but above all as methods, is especially important to developing disciplined con
versations that provide a place in the public square for the largest number of
diverse interests possible. Cultivating disciplined communication and inquiry,
Tiles concludes, is necessary to nourish democratic cultures.
Gert Biesta's "Pragmatism as a Pedagogy of Communicative Action" contin
ues the theme of communication by exploring pedagogical possibilities in the
tradition of John Dewey, Martin Buber, Klaus Mollenhauer, and Paulo Freire
among others. Biesta challenges the three defining characteristics of what he
calls "the modem anthropology of communication." They are the mind/body
dualism, the atomistic view of the human subject as self-sufficient prior to social
interaction, and the notion that mind or consciousness is always the independent
variable that explains but is not itself explained. Biesta provides a detailed "prag
matic anthropology" that challenges the modernist dogmas. The result is what he
calls a "pedagogy of communicative action." His contribution, like others in this
volume, shows that if we take Dewey seriously, we will need to reconstruct a
great deal of our educational practice, research, and theory.
Mary Leach gives the theme of communication and shared experience in
Dewey an insightful and exciting feminist twist in her paper, "(RE)searching
Dewey for Feminist Imaginaries: Linguistic Continuity, Discourse and Gossip."
Leach finds Deweyan thought "friendly to feminist analysis," and identifies
several compatibilities between Dewey's ideas about communication and a
social practice she calls "serious gossip." Mary makes selective use of poststruc
tualism, psychoanalytic work, and critical theory, in conjunction with Deweyan
pragmatism, to provide a feminist critique of the discursive and textual politics
of the West. The result is an original and valuable feminist reconstruction of
Dewey's pragmatism.
In "On What We May Hope: Rorty on Dewey and Foucault," James
Marshall challenges Richard Rorty's claim that there is little difference between
John Dewey and Michel Foucault except "over what we may hope." Marshall
contrasts Dewey's and Foucault's thinking in five domains. They are the social
sciences, methodology, rationality, the individual and the community, and the
subject. Marshall's characterization and criticisms of Dewey and affirmation of
some, although not all, of Foucault's controversial claims provide a valuable
dialectical counterweight to the claims of the new scholarship.
Raymond D. Boisvert advances four related theses in his "John Dewey: An
'Old-Fashioned' Reformer." First, Dewey is old-fashioned in the sense that he
attempted to preserve the best of home education for public schooling. Second,
Dewey saw education as practical, but not in the simplistic sense of providing
job training. Dewey believed that education through, but not for, occupations
provided a holistic integration of interests, habits, and actions. Third, Dewey did
not simply derive his connections between democracy and education from the
importance of an informed electorate, but from considerations of freedom,
equality, widening the scope of interests, and consideration of others. Finally,
Boisvert argues that all education for Dewey was moral education wherein the
4
INTRODUCTION 173
virtues of democratic character, e.g., cooperation and concern for the welfare of
others, were especially important.
Dewey believed that we should educate individuals to the limits of their
capacity. Moral education particularly interested Dewey. So what does all that
mean? Craig A. Cunningham's "Dewey's Metaphysics and the Self' illuminates
the immense influence Dewey's metaphysics exercised on his theory of the self,
including the moral self. Cunningham describes how Dewey's evolving ideas
about metaphysics influenced, modified, and modulated his changing ideas
about the self and what it meant to educate it. Cunningham explicitly remarks on
the importance of Dewey's aesthetic sense of "self-realization." Cunningham
conclusion that in the end Dewey decided that "there is no 'Self' to be 'real
ized,' there is nothing 'in' the future possibilities of the self, no intrinsic essence,
no 'brute core of existence,' no defining characteristics toward which to guide
personal growth," will disturb many educators. Others, like myself, are intrigued
and even enthusiastic.
Susan Laird's essay, "Rethinking 'Coeducation'" examines an issue of consid
erable contemporary interest to educators. Laird finds Dewey's thinking on co
education either incompletely formulated or now anachronistic. Nonetheless,
Susan finds Dewey's insights into the importance of coeducation for democratic
life useful for clarifying what coeducation might mean in current debates.
Reflecting on Dewey's views, their problems, and possibilities, Laird recon
structs him in ways that provide scholars with valuable options for reconceiving
democratic community.
Larry A. Hickman's "Science Education for a Life Curriculum" explores
some of the reasons provided by Dewey for why the public has tended to ignore
or reject the application of scientific methods to perceived difficulties and pro
vides three instances of this "flight from scientific thinking." Larry carefully sep
arates Dewey's comprehension of the structure of the sciences and their cultural
application from the often scientistic views of those who champion or condemn
them. Hickman discusses Dewey's threefold program for improving scientific
thinking within schools, and for the public, by employing "a life curriculum."
In his article, "John Dewey's Impact on Turkish Education," Sabri Btiytik
dtivenci examines the lasting impact of Dewey on Turkish Education basing his
thoughts on Dewey's 1924 reports to the Turkish Ministry of Education and
decades of subsequent practice according to them. Bliytikdtivenci ponders
Deweyan pragmatism as a paradigm for dealing with educational problems and
the harm it may have caused Turkish education when placed in an unreflective
cultural context that he calls "Philosophylessness." Btiytikdtivenci is himself an
admirer and defender of Deweyan pragmatism, but he cautions that any reform
philosophy must consider its cultural context. It is a warning Dewey himself
issued many times, and a caution that educators everywhere should consider
carefully.
As you can see, these papers present a diverse and challenging sampling of
what I have been calling "Education and the New Scholarship on John Dewey."
As the biographical notes on contributors at the end of this book indicate, this
5
174 JIM GARRISON
is a collection written by an internationally distinguished group of philosophers.
It is my hope as editor of this volume that these essays will convince the reader
that the implications of Dewey's philosophy of education have not yet been
exhausted.
NOTE
I Contained in the biographical notes for this collection are the titles of some of these authors' most
influential works.
6
An Epistemological Foundation for Thinking: A
Deweyan Approach
JOHN J. HOLDER
Assistant Professor of Philosophy. St. Norhert College, De Pere, Wisconsin
I. INTRODUCTION
With the proliferation of thinking skills programs and studies of cognition in the
last two decades, it is clear that educators have come to recognize thinking as a
primary goal of education. In an important sense, we are seeing the latent impact
of John Dewey's How We Think, and Democracy and Education. Yet, despite
this increasing focus on thinking, critically important problems in understanding
the nature of thinking itself remain unresolved. Among the most philosophically
significant problems in understanding the nature of thinking are critical deficien
cies in the prevalent epistemology of thinking. The rise of cognitive science in
the middle part of the twentieth century - much of it at odds with Dewey's
understanding of cognition - has created a widely shared epistemological back
ground in which the conception of thinking gives rise to important philosophical
problems. These problems suggest the need for a thorough reconstruction of the
epistemological basis of thinking. Such a reconstruction, I suggest, can best be
developed by a reconsideration of Dewey's work on the issue and by extending
Dewey's ideas in light of some of the recent theories in cognitive science that
appear to carry forward, using the latest tools, some of the basic themes in
Dewey's approach to thinking.
In this essay, I want to focus on one particular issue regarding thinking that
indicates the need for a deeper epistemological reconstruction. It is really a
rather old issue: the problem of understanding thinking as both a rational and a
creative process. Many programs designed to enhance thinking skills assume
that the rational and creative aspects of thinking are easily married in the think
ing process. I firmly agree that this is so, but such a marriage cannot be so easily
achieved given the prevailing epistemological assumptions of many of these
educational programs. Because thinking is typically cast as both a rational
process idealized by information processing or formal logic and (at the same
time) a creative process idealized by the imaginative inventiveness of the artist,
it is not difficult to understand why thinking represents an epistemological
puzzle. In these simple terms, the problem is quite obvious: the widely assumed
epistemology of thinking characterizes rational and creative processes in tension
with, if not in outright opposition to, one another, making unwarranted the view
that such processes are intrinsically connected in a single process called think
ing. While it would take a rather long survey to establish the extent of this
7
Studies in Philosophy and Education 13: 175-192, 1994/95.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Puhlishers.
