Introduction to Section II: Dewey's Living Ideas

In Democracy and Education, Dewey famously condemns what he called “the cold-storage ideal of knowledge,” in which students are asked to accumulate disconnected pieces of information for possible later use.1 This insight is now conventional wisdom for many progressive educators, but it is not only school knowledge that can achieve the status of “cold storage”: scholarly works can gain this status as well, especially as they become canonical in a particular field. Once a work falls into the “cold storage” category, few will deny that it should be read, but even fewer will actually read it. Many of the works of the nineteenth century educational pioneers have already fallen into this category; how many educators still read the work of Maria Montessori, Friedrich Froebel, or, to pick an example from the pragmatist tradition, William James? On the hundredth anniversary of its publication, Democracy and Education has not yet entered the scholarly deep freeze, but certainly more people tend to invoke it or cite it than actually read it. We are hopeful that the essays in this section will contribute to renewing interest in this text and in Dewey's ideas. All of the authors included here are dedicated to the task of showing how key ideas from the book can make a concrete and immediate difference in contemporary educational situations, whether in such big-picture challenges as facing up to the funding crisis in higher education or the task of decolonization, or more everyday challenges like figuring out how to teach math and science in an effective and compelling way. In preparation for our work in editing this section, we both reread Democracy and Education in its entirety, a task neither of us had undertaken since graduate school. As the French like to say, the book has les défauts de ses qualités: the “shortcomings of its virtues.” On the one hand, the book is overly comprehensive and lacks coherence. Designed as a textbook, Democracy and Education covers a large range of topics at breathtaking speed, and it occasionally veers into now-obscure intellectual debates. As Dewey's longtime admirer C. E. Ayres once put it, “[Dewey] is incurably episodic. Whatever the general plan of book or chapter or section, whatever the larger strategy may require, he never passes an enemy trench without mopping it up. Tactics always outdo strategy.”2 On the other hand, the book's incredible range means that it has a great deal to offer. Every chapter addresses a dilemma that remains relevant on the educational scene and provides pathways toward overcoming the attendant challenges. Whether Dewey is insisting on the social nature of intelligence, defining what it means to have an educational experience, or reenvisioning what vocational education should entail, there is always some significant insight on offer. As David Meens notes in his contribution to this section, we must be careful to avoid taking up these proposals as gospel, as they emerged from a particular historical situation, but “to reconstruct Dewey's views critically, with an eye to both their possibilities and limitations, is the Deweyan gesture par excellence.”3 As we went through the editorial process of curating first the proposals and then the essays, a few notable themes have emerged under the overall “living ideas” banner. First, and perhaps most significantly, several of these essays propose reconstructing Dewey's prescriptions for democratic practice in some way. As the welfare state bargain continues to erode and the rich and powerful regain a Gilded Age level of influence in the United States and in other nations around the world, many are thinking about the place and the voice of the ordinary citizen. Several essays in this section take up the question of what grassroots democracy may mean in the age of neoliberalism, specifically within the contexts of public schools and universities. A second emergent theme, closely related to the first, is that of agency. One of the aspects that makes Dewey's educational prescriptions so compelling is his focus on the development of a robust, positive freedom (the power to take action, as opposed to simply freedom from restriction) on the part of learners and, more broadly, citizens. There are essays in the section that deal with enhancing student agency in both math and science education, and that deal with democratic citizenship education more broadly. Several essays also address the challenge of developing agency among university and K–12 educators in the face of both an adverse labor climate and an increasing sense of fatalism. In all of the contributing authors' accounts, Deweyan democracy, in its substantive sense as “a mode of associated living,” is seen as a critical catalyst in giving people back their sense of agency. Above all else, all of the essays in this section have in common the fact that they can be appreciated and immediately put to work by educators and policymakers. While the authors included here are all are in touch with current scholarship on Dewey, their primary purpose is not to advance our understanding of Dewey's work (although many of the essays do this), but rather to provide a curated selection of some the most powerful ideas embedded within Democracy and Education. From reforming math education to reenergizing demoralized teachers to providing frameworks for decolonization, one comes away with a sense, after reading these essays, of new possibilities for education. This was what Democracy and Education provided a century ago, and, as we will show in what follows, this is what it can still provide today. Of all of the essays in this collection, Kurt Stemhagen's “Deweyan Democratic Agency and School Math: Beyond Constructivism and Critique” is probably the most closely related to practice. A former math teacher himself, Stemhagen has pioneered a Deweyan approach to math education, and in previous writings he has argued that it can resolve the familiar tension between the traditional “back to basics” approaches to math and more constructivist approaches. This time around, Stemhagen tackles a new tension that has emerged within the mathematics education community: the rise of a critical theory–tinged strand of math education, which sees constructivists as preoccupied with achievement at the expense of student agency and voice. In an argument that draws on both Democracy and Education and the work at the Laboratory School, Stemhagen suggests that Dewey's integrated approach to mathematics education may provide a constructivist, critical solution that satisfies both camps without compromising either content knowledge or criticality. David Waddington and Noah Feinstein's essay, “Beyond the Search for Truth: Dewey's Humble and Humanistic Vision of Science Education,” explores the ways in which Dewey's conception of science can help us rethink how science is done in schools. They begin with an exploration of Dewey's nonrealist, technological conception of science, which is much more unorthodox than most educators realize. They then demonstrate how such a conception reinforces existing constructivist and humanistic trends in science education, while combating the chauvinist “science from on high” elements of the science curriculum that many students find particularly alienating and mystifying. Although Dewey's faith in modernity provides some grounds for caution, Waddington and Feinstein's essay clears space for an approach to science that emphasizes that scientific ideas are living ideas that unlock powerful possibilities for human agency. The essay by Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders, “‘A Liberation of Powers’: Agency and Education for Democracy,” is concerned primarily with the development of agency and secondarily with curricular change. Boyte and Finders begin the essay by deploring narrow definitions of agency and democracy, and move quickly to an exploration of Dewey's much more robust conceptions of these terms. Suggesting that much of the educational dialogue is dominated by what they see as a misguided set of technocratic discourses about failure, standards, and accountability, they argue that much more attention should be given to agentic, democratic, Deweyan approaches to education. In the final sections of the essay, they argue for one such approach, Public Achievement, a youth civic engagement effort that is now in use in hundreds of communities around the world. Terri Wilson, in her essay “Interest, Not Preference: Dewey and Reframing the Conceptual Vocabulary of School Choice,” focuses on the assumption that parents have distinct preferences for schools, preferences that are expressed in choosing schools for children. This view, shaped by rational choice theory, has been influential in shaping school choice policy. Wilson sees Dewey's view of “interest” as providing alternative conceptual resources for understanding the complexity of parents' choices. She draws on the contrast between a Deweyan view of “interest” and the rational choice account of “preferences” to analyze one parent's choice in more detail. Wilson documents several ways that a rational choice framework falls short in capturing the shifting, situational, and value-laden characteristics of this choice. She argues that Dewey's view of interest offers a vocabulary for exploring how diverse school communities might transform interests toward democratic ends. Moving away from curricular questions, Sarah Stitzlein and Amy Rector-Aranda's essay, “The Role of ‘Small Publics’ in Teacher Dissent,” focuses on developing democracy and agency among teachers. Using Aaron Schutz's analysis of teacher activism as a point of departure, they argue for the development of what they call “small publics” in schools. These small publics are Deweyan democratic spaces within which teachers can dialogue and exchange ideas about the problems they face in the classroom. Whereas Schutz views this type of space as a “stepping stone for more weighty work elsewhere,” Stitzlein and Rector-Aranda argue that small publics are worthwhile both as means and as ends in themselves; they not only prepare teachers to take action in the wider public sphere, but they also provide a critical space “for teachers to think about the meaning and function of power as they themselves engage in acts of establishing and negotiating power together.”4 Kathleen Knight Abowitz takes up similar themes in the context of higher education in “Imagining Democratic Futures for Public Universities: Educational Leadership Against Fatalism's Temptations.” Writing from her perspective as a department chair at a public university, she describes some of the problems facing public higher education: declining rates of public funding accompanied by increased curricular and administrative intervention from the state, the erosion of shared governance, and increased responsiveness to market demands as the institution becomes more tuition-dependent. In the face of these changes, Knight Abowitz argues that it can be tempting to give in to fatalistic accounts that explain how neoliberal trends will inevitably hollow out the university. As a more hopeful alternative, she suggests that university faculty work together to make the university into a more Deweyan democratic environment for both students and faculty, an environment in which civically engaged inquiry and cooperative social intelligence is at the heart of academic activities. Instead of sullenly isolating themselves, tenured faculty members who are disenchanted with the current direction of the university must take a meliorist stance and organize across boundaries in order to fight to save what is worthwhile about the university. Scott Pratt also draws on Deweyan resources to reconsider conceptions of multiculturalism. In his essay, “Geography, History, and the Aims of Education: The Possibility of Multiculturalism in Democracy and Education,” Pratt names and explores a tension between two conceptions of multiculturalism in Dewey's text. He locates the first — and problematic — conception of multiculturalism in Dewey's connection between “progress” and the process of civilization. This view, for Pratt, reinforces a troubling view of multiculturalism rooted in settler colonialism. Pratt sees more hope in an alternative view of multiculturalism, one that he locates in Dewey's account of aims as “ends-in-view.” This alternative, localized conception of multiculturalism — in Pratt's account — better respects boundaries and lines of difference; as such, it offers a more defensible foundation for contemporary multicultural education. In the section's final essay, “Democratic Education versus Smithian Efficiency: Prospects for a Deweyan Ideal in the ‘Neoliberal Age’,” David Meens steps back to examine the contemporary viability of Dewey's socio-educational prescriptions in Democracy and Education. Meens's central task is to bring Dewey's ideas into conversation with neoliberalism, which he defines as “a dogmatic belief that the goals of Smithian efficiency can and should be embraced as the organizing principles of the capitalist economy and also extended to all domains of modern social and political life.”5 Meens argues that when viewed within the neoliberal frame, Dewey's prescriptions become problematic for two reasons: first, Dewey's emphasis on general education and a resistance to specialization is economically inefficient; and second, Dewey's strong, democratic conception of the “the public” is anathema to the neoliberal vision of the public as a conglomeration of individual agents. Meens worries that if the ascendency of neoliberal ideology continues, the Deweyan educational and philosophical project will become increasingly marginalized. Democracy and Education was published in 1916 amid tremendous political, scientific, and technological change. Dewey notes the importance of these broader social forces in his preface: “the philosophy stated in this book connects the growth of democracy with the development of the experimental method in the sciences, evolutionary ideas in the biological sciences, and the industrial reorganization.”6 These profound social changes, for Dewey, created the need for careful reflection about the purposes and values of such change. Indeed, one of the animating concerns of Democracy and Education is how these rapid social forces might be better directed to democratic ends. In these ways, Dewey's classic text embodies the kind of careful critical inquiry — or “the criticism of criticisms”7 — that he understood as the essence of philosophical inquiry. [Criticism] is not a matter of formal treatises, published articles, or taking up important matter for consideration in a serious way. It occurs whenever a moment is devoted to looking to see what sort of value is present; whenever instead of accepting a value-object wholeheartedly, being rapt by it, we raise even a shadow of a question about its worth, or modify our sense of it by even a passing estimate on its probable future.8 Here, Dewey insists that criticism is an essential — and everyday — activity. It involves inquiry into the possible values implicit within various objects, movements, or events; and how those values might be questioned in light of future aims. Where the essays in this section succeed, they take up this same critical, constructive stance with respect to Democracy and Education. Far from “being held rapt” and preaching renewed dedication to a canonical text, they reconstruct and revivify the ideas in it to fit current conditions and probable futures. In doing so, they engage in “the criticism of criticisms,” not only about the ongoing legacy of Democracy and Education, but about diverse areas of educational policy and practice. In one way or another, all of the essays in this section discuss the fact that we are on the brink of a number of adverse social changes that will transform schools and universities. Many of the authors have proposed Deweyan ideas as sites of social resistance and positive educational transformation, and it is our hope that at least some of these essays will serve as important beginnings in this regard. However, the reason that we are so hopeful that they will do so is because of the way in which they critically reconstruct Dewey: they sharpen and reshape the ideas of democracy and agency and apply them to new contexts. More work of this kind is urgently needed; only by subjecting Dewey to this kind of critical transformation will Democracy and Education continue to be relevant for another hundred years. TERRI S. WILSON is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder, UCB 249, Boulder, CO 80309; e-mail <[email protected]>. Her research focuses on the philosophical foundations and normative significance of educational policy, including issues raised by school choice, marketization, and parent engagement. DAVID I. WADDINGTON is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Office LB-545-5, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd., LB-579, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8; e-mail <[email protected]>. His primary areas of scholarship are civic education, the work of John Dewey, and the use (and misuse) of video games as educational tools.

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