John Dewey's Democracy and Education 100 Years On

CONTENTS

Editorial Experience is Not The Whole

Bob Davis Story: The Integral Role of the MAY 2018 VOLUME 2 52: ISSUE OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATIONJOURNAL Situation in Dewey’s Democracy Original Articles and Education 287 Philosophy, Translation and the David L. Hildebrand Anxieties of Inclusion 197 Growth and Growing in Education: Journal of Naoko Saito Dewey’s Relevance to Current Teaching as an Immortality Malaise 301 Project: Positing Weakness in Ruth Heilbronn Philosophy of Education Response to Terror 216 Courage, Uncertainty and Cathryn van Kessel and Kevin Burke Imagination in Deweyan Work: Inferentialism at Work: The Challenging the Neo-Liberal Significance of Social Educational Agenda 316 Epistemology in Theorising Vasco D’Agnese Education 230 Devil, Deceiver, Dupe: Hanno Su and Johannes Bellmann Constructing John Dewey Peirce and Aesthetic from the Right 330 Education 246 Kelley M. King Juliana Acosta López de Mesa ‘To Be Is To Respond’: Realising Working through Resistance to a Dialogic Ontology For Resistance in Anti-racist Teacher Deweyan Pragmatism 345 Education 262 Rupert Higham Jenna Min Shim Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist: Open-Mindedness and the The Journal of John Dewey and Democracy Training of Thought in Democracy and Education and Education 359 John Dewey’s Democracy and Ben Kotzee Philosophy of Education Education 100 Years On 284 Philosophy of Education Book Series Christine Doddington, Ruth Heilbronn Society of Great Britain and Rupert Higham 52: ISSUE 2 VOLUME

JJOPE_52_2_cover.inddOPE_52_2_cover.indd 1 117/09/187/09/18 9:509:50 AMAM Volume 52 Issue 2 May 2018 Contents Editorial Bob Davis

Original Articles Philosophy, Translation and the Anxieties of Inclusion Naoko Saito 197

Teaching as an Immortality Project: Positing Weakness in Response to Terror Cathryn van Kessel and Kevin Burke 216

Inferentialism at Work: The Signiﬁcance of Social Epistemology in Theorising Education Hanno Su and Johannes Bellmann 230

Peirce and Aesthetic Education Juliana Acosta Lopez´ de Mesa 246

Working through Resistance to Resistance in Anti-racist Teacher Education Jenna Min Shim 262

John Dewey and Democracy and Education John Dewey’s Democracy and Education 100 Years On Christine Doddington, Ruth Heilbronn and Rupert Higham 284

Experience is Not The Whole Story: The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education David L. Hildebrand 287

Growth and Growing in Education: Dewey’s Relevance to Current Malaise Ruth Heilbronn 301

Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work: Challenging the Neo-Liberal Educational Agenda Vasco D’Agnese 316

Devil, Deceiver, Dupe: Constructing John Dewey from the Right Kelley M. King 330

‘To Be Is To Respond’: Realising a Dialogic Ontology For Deweyan Pragmatism Rupert Higham 345

Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist: Open-Mindedness and the Training of Thought in Democracy and Education Ben Kotzee 359

Philosophy of Education Book Series Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2018

John Dewey’s Democracy and Education 100 Years On

CHRISTINE DODDINGTON, RUTH HEILBRONN AND RUPERT HIGHAM

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION In September 2016, a four-day conference to mark the centenary of the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education was held in Home- rton College, Cambridge University, jointly sponsored by the college, the Faculty of Education, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and the History of Education Society of the UK. Four years in the planning, it proved to be an ambitious project which captured and encouraged a renewed interest in Dewey and his work. While rightfully celebrating his significance in the history and philosophy of education, the conference also focused on Dewey’s broader reach in current interdisciplinary study, as well as his extensive influence on professional educators and the practice of education within and beyond schools. The call for papers exceeded expectations, with submissions from across the world. After double blind review, just over 100 papers from 25 countries were selected. PESGB’s financial support was instrumental in making attendance affordable, particularly for international delegates. The intention was to integrate theory and practice throughout and, as well as traditional parallel sessions, the conference distinctively featured practitioners and students. UK and Spanish schools demonstrated Philosophy for Children as a basis for student dialogue, and an international school network showed how it was engaging with research to promote democracy. Delegates also had opportunities to experience the Alexander Technique (developed by a lifelong friend of Dewey’s and which he practised himself); to enjoy displays co- created and hosted by the Faculty Library and to visit the newly opened and research-active University of Cambridge Primary School. Strong keynotes and panel sessions by educational philosophers, historians, practitioners and journalists were streamed and shared online. Given the diversity of themes, disciplines and backgrounds, the sense of rapport and community during the conference was remarkable, opening a space in which Dewey’s humane and progressive values were shared. Key to this was the character and scope of Dewey and his work: he was an interdisciplinary polymath, whose texts encompass different disciplines and contexts. This suite of papers offers a glimpse of the diverse philosophical

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 C. Doddington, R. Heilbronn and R. Higham themes discussed during the conference; others with a more practical focus were published in Education (Vol. 46.4, 2018). Opening this collection, David Hildebrand’s article boldly argues that the concept of ‘the situation’ should be considered the equal, if more im- plicit, partner to ‘experience’ in Dewey’s philosophy: ‘experience unfolds in a variety of situations; situations are comprised of experiences’. This in turn becomes the key to Dewey’s view of the teacher’s pedagogical imperative, which is to act as a bridge between powerful codified forms of knowledge and experience and students’ prior experiences and motivations. The creation of relevant, rich and challenging situations enable children’s growth by doing and undergoing—and inasmuch as they are motivated by situations that engage their genuine interest, invoke a moral response of caring. These themes are extended in Heilbronn’s paper, which uses Dewey’s metaphor of growth to examine a scene from Etre et Avoir (2002), a film about an experienced primary teacher in a small school in rural France. She highlights the skill and empathy with which the teacher turns the situation of a hurtful dispute between two boys into an opportunity for personal growth. The scene demonstrates the role of the teacher in promoting ‘democracy as a form of associated living’—present in the intimate details of life interactions. The power of this embedded curriculum, she argues, can only be unleashed through a more inclusive understanding of growth that goes beyond metrics and examinations. Vasco D’Agnese identifies further concepts that he argues are central in Dewey’s work but are not often discussed—risk, courage and imagination. Taking his cue from Dewey’s claim that ‘all thinking involves a risk . . . the invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure’, D’Agnese contrasts Dewey’s provisional, exploratory, innovative approach to learning with the neo-liberal assumption that the purpose of learning is to adapt children to predetermined socioeconomic contexts and conditions. Like Heilbronn, he points out how the space for imaginative, valuable responses to unique situations is increasingly squeezed out by the imperatives of standardised comparison and competition. Kelley King’s paper uses discourse analysis to examine how Dewey is viewed by the American far-right. She reveals that Dewey’s profound influence on progressive and democratic educators is mirrored by both neoconservatives and authoritarian populists. For them Dewey is a talismanic figure of loathing, the mastermind behind a system of public schooling that has brought about catastrophic moral and social decline. Key to this representation is the creation, in blogs and popular books, of a distorting echo chamber of misrepresentations and misquotations, interwoven with other conspiracy theories. Rupert Higham continues this theme by examining Dewey’s exhortation to students, in Experience and Education, to ally themselves to the scientific method as a defence against an increasingly irrational and bellicose global political environment. He argues that Dewey’s pragmatism, by studiously avoiding issues of ontological foundation, fails to provide the motivating imperative for humane thought and action he was searching for. Drawing

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Editors’ Introduction 3 on Bishop Berkeley’s early pragmatic thought, Higham argues that a non- metaphysical, dialogic ontology of ‘original difference’ is fully compatible with Dewey’s philosophy: it enriches his metaphor of growth, affords new possibilities for critical curricular study and develops the intrinsically moral and motivating disposition to be open and responsive to difference. In the final article in this collection Ben Kotzee makes the case for Dewey as a virtue epistemologist, with the concept of open-mindedness, as explicated in Democracy and Education, representing the cardinal virtue that affords genuinely innovative, unbiased and informed responses to the unique situation at hand. Kotzee acknowledges the recent rise in interest in open-mindedness, but critiques how it has been framed by some, as fair and impartial arbitration between different positions, as transcendence and as recognition of fallibility. Instead, he highlights how Dewey focuses on removing the barriers to open-mindedness identified by Locke. This requires habituating a state of ready response, free from prejudice, connecting open- mindedness, curiosity and problem-solving as having key significance for education. These overlapping Deweyan themes—of growth, situatedness, open- mindedness, equitable relationships, and a focus on realising a better human future—continue to inspire and re-energise educational debate and practice. It has been our pleasure to enable this through the conference, through this suite of papers, and elsewhere.

Christine Doddington, email: [email protected] Ruth Heilbronn, [email protected] Rupert Higham, [email protected]

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2018

Experience is Not The Whole Story: The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education

DAVID L. HILDEBRAND

The central objective of Dewey’s Democracy and Education is to explain ‘what is needed to live a meaningful life and how can education contribute?’ While most acquainted with Dewey’s educational philosophy know that ‘experience’ plays a central role, the role of ‘situations’ may be less familiar or understood. This essay explains why ‘situation’ is inseparable from ‘experience’ and deeply important to Democracy and Education’s educational methods and rationales. First, a prefatory section explores how experience is invoked and involved in pedagogical practice, especially experience insofar as it is (a) experimental, (b) direct, and (c) social-moral in character. The second and main section on situations follows. After a brief introduction to Dewey’s special philosophical use of ‘situation’, I examine how situations are implicated in (a) student interest and motivation; (b) ‘aims’ and ‘criteria’ in problem-solving; and (c) moral education (habits, values, and judgements). What should become abundantly clear from these examinations is that there could be no such thing as meaningful education, as Dewey understood it, without educators’ conscious, intentional, and imaginative deployment of experience and situations.

INTRODUCTION The central objective of Dewey’s Democracy and Education (DE), on my reading, is to explain ‘What is needed to live a meaningful life and how can education contribute?’ Everyone acquainted with Dewey’s educational philosophy knows that ‘experience’ plays a central role. But the role of ‘situations’ may be less familiar or understood; readers are not often Dewey specialists, and Dewey doesn’t single out ‘situation’ for deﬁnition. In DE, it is mainly enlisted to support and justify educational proposals. This essay will explain why ‘situation’ is (a) inseparable from ‘experience’, and (b) deeply important to DE’s educational methods and rationales. For Dewey, these two concepts are the existential nexus of all meaning-making, in all

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 D.L. Hildebrand spheres of life. We need them to answer the question ‘What is needed to live a meaningful life and how can education contribute?’ My essay proceeds along the following lines. Because ‘situations’ and ‘experience’ are so closely connected, a prefatory section takes up experience in DE. It reviews several ways experience is invoked and involved in pedagogical practice, especially experience insofar as it is (a) experimental, (b) direct and (c) social-moral in character. The next and main section is on situations. After a brief introduction to Dewey’s special philosophical use of ‘situation’, I examine how situations are implicated in student interest and motivation; ‘aims’ and ‘criteria’ in problem-solving; and moral education (habits, values and judgements). What should become abundantly clear from these examinations is that there could be no such thing as meaningful education, as Dewey understood it, without educators’ conscious, intentional and imaginative deployment of experience and situations.

EXPERIENCE IN DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Experience, in DE as well as throughout Dewey’s corpus, is of signal importance. DE explores this much-misunderstood term, explaining what experience is and why it is significant, especially for educating children. Dewey uses ‘experience’ to replace dualisms (such as mind/body, reason/emotion, individual/ society) with continuities that more adequately express the dynamism of actual life. The substitution of continuities for dualisms accomplishes some of Dewey’s metaphysical purposes, certainly, but it also advances what he takes as our common, human project of trying to live more meaningfully. For, if we could relinquish dualisms that pretend to be ‘ultimate’—authoritative beyond experience—and think, instead, in terms of continuities, we might re-dedicate our practical energies toward particular situations, problems, and people struggling to find safety and happiness in a changing world. DE’s Chapter 11, ‘Experience and Thinking’, focuses on the nature and importance of experience for education. When educators misunderstand experience, they also misunderstand child psychology, short-changing children of their social, emotional and intellectual needs. As a term of art, experience helps us re-envision our relationship to the world—and to one another. It is an evolutionary and ecological rebuttal to traditionalists bent upon categorising and ordering the main and static elements of being (e.g. substances, properties, relations, subjects, objects) and then organising the school to fit. As revealed in various endeavours (science, art, play), experience is never a passive report from objects radically external to agents, but rather shows us already enmeshed in on-going events, already invited toward future interactions with our environment. Reason, Dewey writes, ‘operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 233). I discuss ‘situations’ in the next main section, but first a brief caveat. I can only separate these terms (‘experience’ and ‘situation’) for purposes of discussion. We know that, for Dewey, experience doesn’t happen willy- nilly, in atomistic little bursts. Rather, experience unfolds in a variety of

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education 3 situations; situations are comprised of experiences. But it is useful for educators to think both about the kinds of experiences wished for students and how situations can foment such experiences in the classroom and, more generally, in the institution of schooling. That is part of the purpose behind discussing them as if distinct. Let me turn, now, to three ways experience is indispensable to education: (1) as experimental, (2) as direct and caring, and (3) as social and moral.

Experience as Experimental Experience, Dewey said, is not primarily the cognitive contents of consciousness; it is ‘an active-passive affair’ which involves both ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing.’ We try something—we see (or suffer) the consequences. Such alternating phases of experience begin to be made ‘experimental’ once we relate the details of what is tried with what happens. Dewey writes,

‘Mere activity does not constitute experience . . . Experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance. We learn something’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 146).

Experienced connections between ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’ are not just between concepts or sentences, but between lived experiences—past and present, mine and yours. And this, of course, is not limited to children. Anyone, in virtue of being a live creature, is already engaged in a context— a continuous circuit of activity. Because students’ worlds precede and exceed the classroom, information must be pertinent to be learned; the burden, then, is upon educators to appreciate the rich background of students as individuals. When educators can provide experiences in which students act and undergo something, and when the subject matter utilises previous needs and interests, there is, Dewey says, an ‘urgency, warmth, and intimacy’ to the experience (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 241).

Experience as Direct and Caring Another crucial aspect of experience in DE Dewey names ‘direct’ or ‘had’ experience—it contrasts with ‘indirect’ or ‘reﬂective/known’ experience.1 In contrast to indirect experience—for example, memorisation tasks cou- pled with external rewards or punishments—direct experience is qualitative and felt—it engages motivations and interests already possessed. Engaging the direct experience is, for Dewey, also a moral obligation because that form of connection—between teacher and student, whatever their ages—is tantamount to an acknowledgement of the real dignity of the learner as present right now. ‘Living’, Dewey writes, ‘has its own intrinsic quality and . . . the business of education is with that quality’ (Dewey, 1980

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 4 D.L. Hildebrand [1916], p. 56) Tantamount to ‘respect’ in a Kantian sense, care is also radically empirical because attention is paid to this person, present in this particular way, at this particular time. The learner is a Thou,touse Buber’s term. Put in temporal terms, this is a pragmatism not of future consequences, but of the radically existential present moment.

Experience as Social and Moral: Shared, Social Situations as a Crucial Source of Knowing This moral acknowledgement of the present person naturally leads to a third connection, viz., experience with sociality and morality. Dewey rejects all rigid dualisms between the ‘moral’ and the ‘non-moral’ (acts, values, or characters). All deliberative choice is a comparison between better and worse, so what we call ‘morality’ involves, potentially, all our acts. Humans must accept, then, that ‘deliberation’ is our constant burden; and schools must accept that teaching ‘deliberation’ is a mission both cognitive and moral. The operative question becomes how this should be done. Again direct experience is crucial, especially in social encounters. Education—about values, about moral inquiry—is best accomplished, Dewey thought, not by mere information, rules of inference, or reason-giving but via direct experiences which offer occasions for sympathy and participation in another’s experience. This happens both by communicating and through circumstances which stretch imagination. Crucially, words alone cannot create this, for as Dewey put it, ‘Meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience’ through ‘joint activity by the use of things’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], pp. 19, 33). This clear requirement of moral education—direct experience— ampliﬁes DE’s argument that schools create community. For only an inter- acting community can provide the situations in which direct experience can help students develop moral character.

THE ‘SITUATION’ IN DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Origins and Deﬁnition of ‘Situation’ Let’s turn to ‘situation’, a pivotal concept in both DE and in Dewey’s wider corpus. As with the term ‘experience’, Dewey used ‘situation’ in both colloquial and technical senses. One of the earliest philosophical uses of ‘situation’ is in connection with Leibniz’s monads (1888); much more relevantly, it also appears in 1891’s Moral Theory and Practice.There, Dewey is already telegraphing much later works (such as his 1930 Three Independent Factors in Morals) by denying the usefulness of grand moral nouns (Justice, Love, Truth) in favour of adverbial modiﬁers about how moral acts must respond to the ‘whole situation’ (justly, lovingly, and truly). ‘Situation’ is used extensively in How We Think (1910), in DE (of course), and then appears regularly in later texts. The most conspicuous appearances—those doing most to develop the term, philosophically—are in Experience and Nature (1925), Art As Experience (1934), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education 5 What is a situation? While DE is not a metaphysical book, and there are no extended analytical treatments of situations, the term appears often and diversely enough that one can glean a lot, nevertheless. ‘Situation(s)’ is paired with numerous modifiers, depending on a given discussion’s broader purposes. Modifiers may assign to situation dimensions that are ontological (whole situations,andalso:concrete, actual empirical, real, genuine, life-, complex, complicated, novel, new), temporal (developing, changing), psychological (reflective, intellectual, practical), inquirential (incomplete, indeterminate, uncertain, doubtful, confused, perplexing), social (social, inclusive, common, joint, shared); normative (significant), and sociological (industrial, out-of-school). So, while DE does not overtly define ‘situation’, its uses, consonant with uses in other texts, suggest the following rough definition: a ‘situation’ may be understood as the ‘episodes’ which envelop and inform our experiences, supplying them with a dramatic valence—a pervasive, qualitative character. They are the background, the context, the permeable and environmental conditions, which shape the elements of experience into what—and how— they are. Consider the difference between ‘dropping a dinner fork’ at your kitchen table versus at an elegant dinner. The same event manifests profoundly differently. Why? Because different situations contextualise and characterise those experiences differently. Indeed, the ways a situation organises and characterises experiences can be quite diverse. Situations may be predomi- nantly emotional and personal; they may be calculative and political;they may be foreshortened—or richly informed by a background of history and culture. DE describes many different aspects of situations—ontological, psychological, as they relate to inquiry or our social relations with others. Intersections and mixtures are common. As Dewey puts it: ‘[A] situation stands for something inclusive of a large number of diverse elements existing across wide areas of space and long periods of time, but which, nevertheless, have their own unity’ (Dewey, 1985 [1949], p. 281). A ‘situation,’ he writes in the Logic, ‘[is never] a single object or event or set of objects and events. For we never experience nor form judgments about objects and events in isolation, but only in connection with a contextual whole. This [contextual whole] is what is called a “situation”’ (Dewey, 1985 [1938], p. 72). I want to stress that the difficulty we face in defining a ‘situation’ comes from an old reflex: to try to reify—to nominalise—everything. Situations, it seems clear, are real. Indeed, we help create them all the time. But their reality consists in their function: in framing, collecting, and dramatising experiences. We should not be discouraged by this. As Dewey puts it, just as a ‘quart bowl cannot be held within itself or in any of its contents’ a ‘situation as such is not and cannot be stated or made explicit’ (Dewey, 1985

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 6 D.L. Hildebrand [1930], p. 247) Such a disposition—to nominalise everything or dismiss what cannot be nominalised as ‘unreal’—is rooted in a view of reality as composed of substances and fixed categories, a world full of objects cognitively appropriated by names. Trying to set the record straight with Bertrand Russell—who couldn’t make sense of ‘situation’ because it was not defined in advance of inquiry—Dewey wrote, ‘Anyone who refuses to go outside [mere] discourse—as Mr. Russell apparently does—has of course shut himself off from understanding what a ‘situation’, as directly experienced subject-matter, is . . . . [A]ll discourse is derived from and inherently referable to experiences of things in non-discursive experiential having’ (Dewey 1985 [1939], p. 31). Let us move to more practical issues, now, and ask what work is done by Dewey’s term, ‘situation’ in DE? Mainly, it provides educators with a justification (a logical, psychological, pedagogical and moral rationale) to reconstruct curricula and methods to be radically experimental, interper- sonally caring, and socially relevant to actual students. Let us look at three ways this worked. 1. Situations: Student interest and motivation Let us first consider student interest and motivation. Teachers typically pose problems for students to solve. The timeworn challenge has been inspiring and sustaining interest. Often, students are blamed for lack of interest—they’re labelled ‘lazy’, ‘distracted’ or ‘unmotivated’. Sometimes, lack of interest is medicalised and prescriptions become an integral part of the ‘learning strategy’. The timeworn ‘solution’ has been some form of conditioning (a mixture of carrots, sticks) which is institutionalised (grades, ranks, awards, etc.) to affirm this over the long term. Dewey believed the problem to be rooted not in student attitudes, but in educators’ ignorance about the origins of interest. Remedying this avoids blaming students or inventing more powerful carrots and sticks; rather, educators must understand that ‘the stimulus resides in the situation with which [students are] actually confronted’. Educators who grasp this are liberated to create situations in which ‘objects and modes of action . . . [are] connected with [students’] present powers’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], pp. 54, 133). Cultivating such situations requires planning. Curricular content, all agree, must be conveyed and will play a part; but equally important will be a sympathetic understanding of students’ personality, social and intellectual backgrounds, tastes and even emotional temperaments. Is it not reasonable to think that in our contemporary age (of remote, online ‘distance learning’, ‘MOOCs’ and technologically ‘flipped’ classrooms) that now, more than ever, Dewey’s point is especially salient? For as we become distracted by new mediums of transmission, we often forget that the goal is not necessarily transmission at all; it is, rather, the creation of a situation which is broader and deeper than any quantum of information. No technology that merely states an idea—whether live lecture, book reading,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education 7 interactive computer program, etc.—can match the efficacy of genuine, shared situations. Dewey writes, ‘Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does [the student] think’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 167). Creating genuine situations requires profound care; conditions must reflect participants’ individuality or pedagogy fails. For various reasons (driven especially by economics and class), there is precious little opportunity for this kind of education. As a result, conditions become more alienating: students become more inured, teachers suffer a loss of autonomy (to standardised tests, administrators, bureaucracy), and even, Dewey says, lose their sense of humour!2 2. Situations: ‘Aims’ and ‘criteria’ in problem-solving The next connection is between the situations created by teachers and the source of the aims and criteria used to assess students’ solutions. Consider what a sceptic might say, here. ‘Pose a problem. Fine. But from where could the means for a solution come? Mustn’t the teacher reveal to the students what the specific means are?’ Indeed, the sceptic might continue, ‘Isn’t education all about the methodical revelation of already understood connections between means and ends?’ Dewey argued that while rehearsing such connections has a place in pedagogy, learning involves students imagining the situation which gave birth to the problem; they must attempt to answer, for themselves, ‘How did those inquirers—in their situation—derive their clues?’ Let me offer an illustration. In fictional murder mysteries, often one clue (a suspect, a motive, a proposed sequence of events) is over-emphasised; this myopia sidelines the detectives until they realise they need to revisit the initial situation (e.g. crime scene). (Usually, the audience has been screaming for them to do this for some time!) The source of missing clues (or means or fresh possibilities) are to be sought from the initial indeterminate situation itself. As Dewey put it, ‘the perplexities of the situation [suggest] certain ways out’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 154). Dewey’s earnest advice (to go back to the situation) applies to all inquirers, whether they are in education, the sciences, or your local police. A second illustration comes from Dewey’s own Lab School. As Michael Tiboris and Scot Danforth (Tiboris and Danforth, 2016) point out in a recent paper about Dewey’s use of ‘occupations’ in the curriculum, the Lab School used a situation-based approach to help students become autonomous— both self-possessed in their own sense of identity as well as better able to take on the responsibilities of the larger society they would soon inherit. The autonomy that schooling aims at, they point out, is of a ‘substantive’ type and not merely ‘procedural’. It is substantive because it conveys de- terminate values (about self-determination, community, productivity and democratic participation) not merely procedural values (skill-sets for later activities). In their recounting, the Deweyan school contributes to such ‘substantive autonomy’ by using situations deployed within two dramatic and pedagogical roles: ‘scientific sociologist’ and ‘practical community builder’.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 8 D.L. Hildebrand The ﬁrst role, ‘scientiﬁc sociologist’, works using the subjects of history, science and technology, but in a way that connects these subject matters to values. In this process students would study history, especially the material and social conditions leading to their present, with a special eye toward how challenges were overcome and how this had shaped present social attitudes. In other words, by creating situations of historically-situated problem solving (e.g. making candles to create light at night) students had to ‘inhabit’ others’ situations; this creates a sympathy with the internal logic and challenges of others’ situations (in this case, their own ancestors’) which could provide students with a wider sense of their own relation to society across a longer temporal span than their immediate world. ‘Instead of simply being told how others had thought about solving social problems, they performed the tasks themselves in order to inhabit the reasoning of other societies’ (Tiboris and Danforth, 2016, p. 646). By inhabiting that historical situation, students could come to see the degree to which it was contingent to a certain pattern of life. The larger lesson was for students to gain greater purchase on the ways of life unfolding around them, and to be better equipped to assume ‘a fallibilist and pragmatic attitude about the conditions of their social world’ (Tiboris and Danforth, 2016, p. 647). Such an attitude, Dewey thought, was a prerequisite to democratic citizenship. Society is not merely an unchangeable background in which students live, but is an active site in which they are increasingly agents, capable of changing meaning for themselves and others by maintaining or changing the ways material and social resources are distributed (Tiboris and Danforth, 2016, p. 650). The second way DE’s use of situations could inculcate autonomy was via the role of ‘practical community-builders’. Here, Tiboris and Danforth point out, students and teachers in Dewey’s school did ‘hands-on experimentation with the industrial, agricultural, and domestic occupations of their society’ to understand challenges related to food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. This cooperative work, ‘thrust children into active participation with our ‘fundamental relations to the world’ doing the ‘types of the processes by which society keeps itself going’ (Tiboris and Danforth, 2016, p. 647, quoting from Dewey’s The School and Society). This role is:

‘ . . . meant to teach children to prefer activities that contribute to meeting shared social needs. A world in which students approach the world scientiﬁcally, applying their knowledge in concrete ways to solve real collective social challenges through their work, is one in which they will be more likely to ﬁnd meaning in what they do’ (Tiboris and Danforth, 2016, p. 648).

The point, here, is that situations are crucial sources of the means, criteria and clues to solving problems. (This includes, as Tiboris and Danforth point out, ‘occupations’, which are just a special kind of pedagogically- designed situation). Any problem we face happens at a novel point in time, and is always to some degree unique. Pedagogies which provide stock- solutions or provoke overly-speculative ‘brainstorming’ bypass a better

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education 9 method—namely, that of directing students to direct concentrated observation and imagination toward actual situations. 3. Situations: Moral education (habits, values, and judgments) The last connection is between situations and the way we convey and pass along our values—call it ‘moral education’. As explained earlier (in connection to direct experience), education has a vital role to play in moral development. But this is not, as DE points out, a specialised part of the curriculum—the ‘morality course’!—but rather is integral to education’s general mission. ‘Morals’, as Dewey puts it, ‘concern nothing less than the whole character’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 366). Character, of course, is shaped interactively—via created or encountered situations; the challenge is to deal with situations in deliberate intelligence. When one is ‘in charge’ of children—say, in a mathematics or language or biology class—one is simultaneously responsible for delivering content and for their development as human beings. This latter, moral, responsibility is operative no matter what the subject is. Morality is taught insofar as one is always shaping habits. ‘All habits’, Dewey writes in Human Nature and Conduct ‘are demands for certain kinds of activity; and [habits] constitute the self’ (Dewey, 1978 [1922], p. 21). Attitudes (or virtues, to use an older term) such as compassion contribute to growth; understood as comprised of habits, these can be reinforced and developed with certain situations. Attitudes destructive of growth (vices), also understood as habits, can be reconstructed. For example, habits of social exclusion—for example, on a playground, of a child who is new to the school—can be addressed by situations in which those perpetrating the exclusion themselves become estranged; such an experiment might induce sympathy, be explicated (in discussion or writing), and then the situation of earlier exclusion might be explored. Such a process might lead to a reconstruction of the attitudes (habits) involved and the prevention of future exclusionary acts. Let me quickly clarify the connection between ‘situations’ and ‘habits’. Habits are not like personal property, exclusive to a self. A habit is transactional—it comes from and is ingredient to situations. As Dewey said, ‘Habits enter into the constitution of the situation; they are in and of it, not . . . something outside of it’ (Dewey, 1978 [1911], p. 120). So, I may have a habit of eating sweets after dinner, but this habit isn’t isolated; my body’s chemistry, the family who joins in, or the properties of the food all constitute the situation and reinforce the behaviour we happen to isolate as ‘David’s sweet-tooth-habit’. Because an individual’s habits are enmeshed in many transactions beyond that individual, schools and teachers must take their task to be the nature of the situations they are creating for their students. Dewey writes:

‘A curriculum which acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 200).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 10 D.L. Hildebrand Creating genuine situations can help students understand the meaningful implications of different kinds of conduct, but this cannot come from a lecture or (in a religious context) a sermon; genuine knowledge can only be created through situations.

Values and Valuation To round out this discussion about moral education, consider the connection between situations and values (and value judgments). One profound and shared misapprehension is that values are somehow independent of everyday conduct. On that assumption, education mistakenly takes its challenge to be inducing (persuading, cajoling, coercing) students into following moral codes or rules. DE argues that moral values (and aims) are the results of past inquiries, which themselves emerge from (and return for application to) new problematic situations. The challenge is to develop or modify habits (or dispositions) which can serve to mitigate or resolve the problem at issue. Consider a child given two pieces of a candy while his brother has none. For many children, this presents a problematic situation; the child may be ‘ill at ease’ and forced to think about what to do. The situation is ‘indeterminate’—a quandary. He may, of course, apply the rule (or value) handed down from his parents—which says ‘always share’. But while this solution provides one route (from indeterminacy to determinacy), it requires neither personal investment nor perspicuous analysis of the ‘actual empirical’ situation (as Dewey calls it). This solution lacks authenticity; no personal habits are modiﬁed or changed. An authentic solution involves inquiry—observation, hypothesis, reﬂection, testing out, implementation in action—not generally different from other inquiry-situations. In this instance, a parent might intervene to ask how a child who did not want to share would feel if his sibling had the candy, to initiate an inquiry aimed at a more authentic solution. More dramatically, at a later time, a parent might try offering the deprived child candy without also giving the other child any; once the other child who had not shared protests, the parent can use the created situation as a teachable moment which refers back to the earlier episode. Dewey’s approach here is in no way new. Twenty-three years earlier, in a piece entitled ‘Teaching Ethics in The High School’ (1972 [1893]), he lays out the situation-based method. Present students with a case of apparent misery, he writes, and ask the pupils how they would decide . . . whether to relieve it and, if so, how . . . . This should be done without any preliminary dwelling upon the question as a ‘moral’ one,

‘Above all . . . it should be made clear that the question is not what to do, but how to decide what to do. . . . [T]he whole object of the method I am bringing forward is not to get children to arguing about [which moral rules to deploy in a given case but rather] . . . to get them into the habit of mentally constructing some actual scene of human interaction, and of consulting that for instruction as to what to do . . . . The whole point, in a word, is to keep the mental eye constantly upon

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education 11 some actual situation or interaction; to realize in the imagination this or that particular needy person making his demand upon some other particular person’ (Dewey, 1972 [1893], pp. 56–57). The ultimate purpose, Dewey adds, is to form, ‘ . . . in the mind of the person taught, the habit of realizing for himself and in himself the nature of the practical situations in which he will find himself placed . . . the formation of a sympathetic imagination for human relations in action’ (Dewey, 1972 [1893], p. 57). It is easy to underestimate how radical Dewey’s suggestion is—how dramatically we must shift attention onto the present process of judgment. For even in those cases where the end seems inviolable—such as ‘Don’t murder’—Dewey emphasises the dominance of the present, not the future, as determinative: ‘Foreseen ends are factors [for control] in the development of a changing situation. . . . [Ends] are subordinate to the situation . . . not the situation to them. They are not ends in the sense of finalities to which everything must be bent and sacrificed. They are, as foreseen, means of guiding the development of a situation’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 182). These two facts about values—that (a) they are authentic insofar as they are ingredient in inquiry, and (b) that their prospective power is relative to their deployment in present situations—yields another important conclusion in DE. As Dewey puts it, ‘In the abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a particular situation in which choice has to be made, there is no such thing as degrees or order of value’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 248). This rejection of a fixed hierarchy of values is present in works that both precede and follow DE.

The Constructive Transvaluation of Values This last point of Dewey’s—his denial of fixed degrees or orders of value— leads nicely to a final way in which situations can play a role in schools’ value education. In a recent piece entitled ‘The Educational Community as Intentional Community’ Igor Jasinski and Tyson E. Lewis develop an imaginative conception of community to which situation-based pedagogy can contribute. By drawing upon Dewey in conjunction with Giorgio Agamben, Gert Biesta, and others, they propose that schools can use ‘situations’ not only to further learning—in the sense of delivering content, skills, and other instrumentalities—but to also create ‘disruptions’ or ‘exposures’ that focus on those present in order to facilitate what they call an ‘intentional community,’ right there and then. They write, ‘An intentional community . . . interrupts the taken-for- granted logic of means and ends that underlies how learning communities are more often than not depicted and justified, thus opening up a different kind of educational space and time’ (Jasinski and Lewis, 2015, p. 373).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 12 D.L. Hildebrand Their disruption is countenanced by a more fundamental distinction they offer, one between schools’ typical approach to community (a ‘community of inquiry’ dedicated to dialogic pedagogy) and what they term a ‘community of infancy’. The key difference, they explain, is that ’the community of infancy’ temporarily suspends the ritual of teaching in which the teacher commands the authoritative, knowledgeable, voice. In this mode, the teacher stands neither above nor amidst their students but beside them—and allows their typical voice of ‘reasonableness and truth’ to ‘fall silent’ (Jasinski and Lewis, 2015, p. 374 and 377). This burden-shifting is necessary to enable the students to create ‘an experience’ which is truly theirs:

‘As long as the voice of the teacher, as the voice of reasonableness, is present, the students are looking to the teacher for validation and conﬁrmation, which means that the students’ voices will continue to manifest themselves in reasonable speech. Once the voice of the teacher is removed, the students are left to their devices’ (Jasinski and Lewis, 2015, p. 374).

In other words, the teacher creates a situation which must be fully and energetically entered into by students and teacher together, with the aim of strengthening communal bonds. The goal is to create education via ‘an experience’ (to use Dewey’s aesthetic phrase) rather than just ‘an exercise’ which might just happen to educate. As Jasinski and Lewis put it, this approach ‘thus interrupts the focus on actualisation (realisation of aims or purposes), and instead allows for the experience of contingency and indeterminacy at the heart of the process of communal inquiry’ (Jasinski and Lewis, 2015, p. 374). As I understand it, Jasinski and Lewis are not recommending that educators dispense with the more traditional problem-solving and instrumental kinds of learning communities where ‘identity is solidiﬁed, ranks established, interests collectivised, shared problems overcome’ (Jasinski and Lewis, 2015, p. 376). Rather, the idea is that by also creating situations where students can have a ‘communal experience of openness and indeterminacy’ educators can help students locate and own what Agamben calls the ‘power of community’ (Jasinski and Lewis, 2015, p. 376). While such an approach may seem quite radical, given the very traditional roles that even progressive teachers must still play in the classroom, it is actually an experiment quite in keeping with the more signiﬁcant societal role Dewey affords the school, per se.Forif our world (including our experience and interpretations of it) is in perpetual change, and if it the goal of the school to equip students for that change—to reinvent democracy to suit each coming cohort of generations—then students really do need experience with indeterminate situations where they can feel and confront the existential burden of choice. The alternative is to deny that such precarious change is endemic in existence; to encourage habits much more imbued with passivity; and to rest, tacitly if not explicitly, upon the illusion that facts and goals are already known in advance, and all that is required,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey’s Democracy and Education 13 really, are new technologies of implementation. From Dewey’s perspective, down that road lies not authentic human freedom, but authoritarianism and enslavement.

CONCLUSION By all accounts, John Dewey lived a meaningful life which integrated philosophy, education and politics. DE provides a good look into the principles and insights which informed his life. Because change is the only constant, Dewey knew that each generation must reinvent democracy to respond to novel conditions, needs and challenges. Education’s job, Dewey said, went beyond the delivery of the facts and meanings that those controlling society want to imbue in coming generations. Our greater duty was to ‘liberate the young from reviving and re-traversing the past’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], p. 79). It takes ﬂexibility and courage to simultaneously educate-and-let-go. But ‘let go’ we must, for ‘letting go’ means ‘setting free’. And really, there is no higher love.3

Correspondence: David L. Hildebrand, Associate Professor and Chair, Uni- versity of Colorado Denver, Department of Philosophy, PO Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA. Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

NOTES

1. While the had/known (direct/indirect experience) distinction appears in many of Dewey’s works, some especially important places to look include—‘The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism’ (Dewey, 1980 [1905]); ‘Qualitative Thought’ (Dewey, 1985 [1930a], especially pp. 211–212); Experience and Nature (Dewey, 1985 [1925], especially pp. 26–27), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Dewey, 1985 [1938], especially pp. 74–75). Dewey puts the point nicely in ‘In Reply to Some Criticisms’ (Dewey, 1985 [1930]): ‘Things that are had in experience exist prior to reflection and its eventuation in an object of knowledge; but the latter, as such, is a deliberately effected re-arrangement or re-disposition, by means of overt operations, of such antecedent existences’ (p. 212). 2. Dewey captures the plight of teachers burdened by authoritarian pedagogies here: ‘Experiences are had under conditions of such constraint that they throw little or no light upon the normal course of an experience to its fruition. “Methods” have then to be authoritatively recommended to teachers, instead of being an expression of their own intelligent observations ....Theeffectofthissituation in crippling the teacher’s sense of humor has not received the attention which it deserves’ (Dewey, 1980 [1916], pp. 175, 345–346). 3. This essay adapts, with some modification, a presentation given at the conference on John Dewey’s Democracy and Education 100 Years On: Past, Present, and Future Relevance, held at the University of Cambridge, 28 September–1 October 2016. It also draws upon material presented in my article ‘The Paramount Importance of Experience and Situations in Dewey’s Democracy and Education’ (Hildebrand, 2016). The main aim of the modifications has been to orient the accounts of Dewey’s theoretical philosophical ideas even more toward pedagogy and practical technique than previously.

REFERENCES

Dewey, J. (1969 [1888]) Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Early Works: 1882–1898 Volume 1 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 14 D.L. Hildebrand

Dewey, J. (1969 [1891]) Moral Theory and Practice, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Early Works: 1882–1898 Volume 1 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1972 [1893]) Teaching Ethics in the High School, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Early Works: 1882–1898 Volume 4 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1978 [1910]) How We Think, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924 Volume 6 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1978 [1911]) Brief Studies in Realism: Epistemological Realism: the Alleged Ubiquity of the Knowledge Relation, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Middle Works: 1899–1924 Volume 6 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1978 [1922]) Human Nature and Conduct, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924 Volume 14 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1980 [1905]) The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Middle Works: 1899–1924 Volume 3 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1980 [1916]) Democracy and Education in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Middle Works: 1899–1924 Volume 9 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1925]) Experience and Nature, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 1 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1930]) In Reply to Some Criticisms, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 5 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1930a]) Qualitative Thought, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 5 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1930b]) Three Independent Factors in Morals, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 5 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1934]) Art As Experience, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 10 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1938]) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 12 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1939]) Experience, Knowledge, and Value: A Rejoinder, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 14 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Dewey, J. (1985 [1949]) Appendix: Dewey’s Reply to Albert G. A. Balz, in: Jo Ann Boydston (ed.) The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953 Volume 16 (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Hildebrand, D. (2016) The Paramount Importance of Experience and Situations in Dewey’s ‘Democ- racy and Education’, Educational Theory, 66.1-2, pp. 73–88. Jasinski, I. and Lewis, T. E. (2015) The Educational Community as Intentional Community, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1.13, pp. 371–383. Tiboris, M. and Danforth, S. (2016) Learning to Occupy Yourself, Social Theory and Practice, 42.3, pp. 636–654.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 0, No. 0, 2018

Growth and Growing in Education: Dewey’s Relevance to Current Malaise

RUTH HEILBRONN

The article examines what Dewey means by ‘growth’, why it is significant and why it should concern us as educators. A metric use of ‘growth’ is current, as in economic discourse as Gross National Product (GNP), or audited reporting on examination results to produce international achievement data. Dewey’s principle of growth focuses on the situation of a child ‘living’ in a classroom, reminding us that children do not go to school as some kind of interruption in their living and developing. The first section of the article discusses the Deweyan concept of ‘growth’ as elaborated in Democracy and Education, and situates it within his philosophy more widely, particularly in relation to ‘democracy as a form of associated living’. The second section presents a detailed transcript of a scene from the film Etre et Avoir as an illustration of Dewey’s concept of growth. The transcript is presented as narrative exemplification, to illuminate the relevance and significance of this account to educational processes and practices. The scene is typical of the whole film and it follows an experience that is common to children and teachers. The article concludes by contrasting the Deweyan conception of growth to the audit conception, and makes some suggestions for ways forward on what might be done in restrictive circumstances to combat a narrowly defined view of growth in education.

INTRODUCTION The article examines what Dewey means by ‘growth’, why it is significant and why it should concern us as educators. Dewey’s concept of growth can bring our focus onto thinking about the situation of a child ‘living’ in a classroom, so that when Dewey says we should ‘cease con- ceiving of education as mere preparation for later life and make of it the full meaning of the present life’ (Dewey, 1897, p. 50) he is reminding us that children don’t go to school as some kind of interruption in their living and developing. What they experience at school is this living and developing—formation in the widest sense. Dewey calls growth ‘a principle’.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 R. Heilbronn In the discourse of quantiﬁable data, ‘growth’ entails measurement, as in ‘the child has grown two inches this year’ or in national economic growth measured by the comparison of yearly GNP (Gross National Product). One way in which growth is interpreted in education is as audit—where educational ‘outputs’ such as examinations and standard assessment tests are used in international comparisons. The concept of audit in education is well understood and experienced and there is a large literature on the implications of current policies on processes and practices (e.g. Aronwitch and Giroux, 2004; Ball, 1999; Ball et al., 1997; Gewirtz et al., 1995; McMurtry, 1991; Schrecker, 2010; Watkins, 2012). Ball has characterised this conception as a performativity agenda and established it as set within an economic paradigm:

‘Performativity, it is argued, is a new mode of state regulation which makes it possible to govern in an ‘advanced liberal’ way. It requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to tar- gets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation . . . ’ (Ball, 2003, p. 215).

Set against the background of current educational policy, the paper discusses Dewey’s concept of growth and contrasts it to its use in a dominant performativity discourse. The first section of the article discusses the Deweyan concept of ‘growth’ as elaborated in Democracy and Education, and situates it within his philosophy more widely, particularly in relation to ‘democracy as a form of associated living’. The second section presents a detailed transcript of a scene from the film Etre et Avoir (Philbert, 2002) as an illustration of Dewey’s concept of growth. The transcript is presented as narrative exemplification, to illuminate the relevance and significance of this account to educational processes and practices.1 The scene is typical of the whole film and it follows an experience that is common to children and teachers. As such I believe that it is effective in giving an insight into the relevance of Dewey’s concept of growth to current practices. The article concludes by contrasting the Deweyan conception of growth to the economic conception and makes some suggestions for ways forward—what might be done in restrictive circumstances to combat a narrowly defined view of growth in education.

PART 1. GROWTH, EDUCATION AND EDUCATIVE EXPERIENCE Growth and Growing Growth is a key concept for Dewey (see Keall, 2010 and Bernstein, 2010, p. 92). Hook (1959) believes it to be the key educational and moral value in Dewey’s philosophy (p. 1013). As with many of Dewey’s conceptions, the term suffers somewhat from instability of sense, a fuzziness in deﬁnition (Rorty, 1999, p. 125) and ‘appears to lack clearly deﬁned and stable criteria’ (Emerson, 1982, p. 26).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Growth and Growing in Education 3 In spite of this seeming lack of precision, the concept of growth as used by Dewey can be usefully elucidated and has significance for contemporary practice in education, as witnessed by the number of texts recently devoted to it.2 It is a powerful concept, and Popp for example has claimed that, ‘Democracy and Education . . . is arguably America’s most important book on education, because it presents the theory of growth that is to this day, the general moral concept providing direction to, inter alia, teaching and the development of educational programs’ (Popp, 2015, p. 45). It is also a unifying concept for Dewey who defines ‘the criterion of education as growing’ (1938, p. 20). Chapter 4 of Democracy and Education, entitled ‘Education as Growth’, starts with a statement about the inter relationship between society and the child, the role of education and the idea of growth. Dewey tells us that ‘in directing the activities of the young, society determines its own future in determining that of the young’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 46). Further, he lays out the primary condition of growth as ‘immaturity’, which is defined non-teleologically. Immaturity is not a lack of maturity, it is ‘something positive, not a mere void or lack’ (ibid.). Immaturity is a state ‘in the moment’ indicating being in development: ‘ . . . when we say that immaturity means the possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers which may exist at a later time; we express a force positively present—the ability to develop’ (ibid.). Dewey’s idea of education is not dependent on a deficit view of the child as lacking an end state of maturity, which education needs to bring about. This mistaken view comes about, ‘ . . . due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and will not have till he becomes a man’ (ibid.). The child is immature but not in so far as there is some ‘ideal and standard a static end’ (ibid., p. 47). ‘Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a positive force or ability, the power to grow’ (ibid.). For Dewey, ‘education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself’ (1916, p. 52). Dewey sees the child growing within the social. Hu- man infants can survive and can thrive, even though they are physically vulnerable, because of their social capacity: ‘ . . . children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for social intercourse . . . . The native mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness’ (ibid., p.48). Children’s development relies on mutual dependency in the sense that the young experience and experiment within the social milieu and are also receiving the culture and mediated experience of adults. This is how society

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 4 R. Heilbronn develops. Key qualities that enable this development are flexibility and plasticity. With their social responsiveness, children learn from experience and develop dispositions and habits. Active adjustments to the environment develop into ‘habits of active use of our surroundings’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 52). There can be good or bad habits—education, informal and formal should be a process of developing good habits. Dewey does not recognise an end to growth and this raises questions about how we decide on the curriculum. If, as he claims, ‘in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education’ (ibid.), and if ‘the only purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that insure growth’ (ibid.), are we justified in teaching anything at all? Criticism persists that without a goal for growth we are unable to distinguish between good growth or bad growth and so have no clear justification or even idea of curriculum preference. Without clear notions of what constitutes the good, there is no legitimacy for the idea of core knowledge, of a body of subject disciplines that can form the basis of a coherent curriculum. This line of critique has been expounded among others by Hirsch (1987), Bloom (1987) and Ravitch (2000). Radical theorists have also criticised Dewey’s ateleology as insufficiently privileging independent and critical thinking, thereby perpetuating power relationships.3 Dewey directly addresses these questions in his essay Experience and Education (1938), particularly relevant is Chapter 7, ‘Progressive Organi- sation of Subject Matter’ (Dewey, 1938, pp. 48–63) from which it is clear that he believes that subject knowledge is important, but that curriculum content should start from the experience of the students. He maintains that we construct curricula based on the values we hold, but in so doing we should come to what is relevant in the context of the students. The curriculum we choose should not, in his philosophy of education, be pre-chosen from outside the situation of the people living the educative experience:

‘But ﬁnding the material for learning within experience is only the ﬁrst step. The next step is the progressive development of what is already experienced into a fuller and richer and also more organised form, a form that gradually approximates that in which subject-matter is presented to the skilled, mature person’ (ibid., p. 48).

Dewey acknowledges the degree of skill and knowledge required by teachers to guide and lead curricula in order to balance the necessity for material to be relevant to children’s experiences and to build subject knowledge. He is not wedded to the idea of learning everything through experiencing it. His is a weaker claim that what is presented to children needs to mean something to them, to speak to their own experiences. ‘Concrete educational experience is the primary source of all inquiry and reﬂection’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 28). He believes that ‘improvisation that takes advantage of special occasions prevents teaching and learning from being stereotyped and dead’ (ibid.), and signiﬁcantly he acknowledges that,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Growth and Growing in Education 5 ‘ . . . the basic material of study cannot be picked up in a cursory manner. Occasions which are not and cannot be foreseen are bound to arise wherever there is intellectual freedom. They should be utilized. But there is a decided difference between using them in the development of a continuing line of activity and trusting to them to provide the chief material of learning’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 53). Sufficient justification for Dewey’s views have been made, in my view to answer the charge that the non-teleological nature of growth does not justify teaching any curriculum content—see for example Hook (1959), Rorty (1980) and Kliebard (2004). Nevertheless, ‘this line of criticism has had a curious staying power’ (Simich, 1978). I believe that many of the difficulties posed by Dewey’s ateleology can be satisfied if we accept two aspects of his work, the first that we cannot take one concept in isolation from others and the second that Dewey’s concept of growth is normative, not descriptive. The two are inter-related. It is because growth is linked in a nexus of concepts that its normative nature emerges. The concept of growth connects with and is dependent on other concepts (see, for example, Emerson, 1982; and Simmons, 1985), particularly, ‘continuity of experience’, education, and democracy. This is to be expected in Dewey’s naturalising philosophy, which draws heavily upon evolutionary biology. We expect to find an ecological interdependence of ideas in which no single concept taken in isolation makes sense without relationship with others. In The Quest for Certainty (1936), Dewey has explained this interdependence of ideas, when he defines ‘operational relations’. Concepts rely on other concepts for their meaning—connections are ‘instituted through operations which define ideas’ (Dewey, 1936, p. 126). Definitions of concepts need to be made ‘in terms of relations and not of antecedent things’ (ibid.), and this represents an aspect of the ‘view of nature as a system of interconnected changes’ (ibid.). Significantly too, Dewey often interchanges ‘growth’ with ‘growing’, as in Experience and Education in which he talks of ‘the criterion of education as growing’ (1938, p. 20). The use of ‘growing’ suggests an existential state that ‘growth’ does not so readily do, since using a present participle of a verb articulates the idea as a continuous present (‘she is growing’), whereas using a noun—‘growth’—articulates an abstract concept. A similar effect happens with Dewey’s theory of knowledge, where he frequently uses ‘knowing’ in certain passages. Two other ideas that are usefully discussed in connection to ‘growth’ and ‘growing’ are ‘continuity of experience’ and ‘democracy as associated living’, which taken together help to further clarify the relevance of Dewey’s discussion as applied to education practices.

Continuity of Experience Continuity of experience is a term that Dewey uses to move from the idea of learning from experience to the idea of being able to learn anything at all. In this sense ‘continuity of experience’ is an uncontentious term. He

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 6 R. Heilbronn states that ‘the principle of continuity of experience is fundamental in the constitution of experience’ (1938, p. 31). The principle of continuity of experience is exemplified by growth, or growing ‘not only physically but intellectually and morally’ (ibid., p. 19). The child grows through experience which needs some kind of ‘mechanism’ to become an integrated whole, a flow. Continuity is necessary to create meaningful experience, in the sense that Dewey has to account for the development of habits and dispositions out of what might seem isolated experiential moments or instances. He puts this as follows: ‘From the memory standpoint experience presents itself as a multi- plicity of episodic events with just enough continuity among them to suggest principles’ (Dewey, 1906, p.143). These ‘principles’ enable intellectual and moral development, lived through the formation of habits and dispositions. As Dewey puts it, ‘out of the experiential continuum settled habits and dispositions develop’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 12). In this ‘the principle of continuity of experience’ is key: ‘So I come back to the principle of continuity of experience . . . At bottom, this principle rests upon the fact of habit, when habit is interpreted biologically. The basic characteristic of habit is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and un- dergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences’ (ibid., p. 19). Dewey clarifies what he means by ‘habit’ as going ‘deeper than the ordinary conception of a habit as a more or less fixed way of doing things, although it includes the latter as one of its special cases’ (ibid., p. 19) and further, habit, in this sense, ‘covers the formation of attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual; it covers our basic sensitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living’ (ibid.). Habits develop because: ‘ . . . the principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after’ (ibid., p. 19). Clearly Dewey’s conception of growth is normative, otherwise it could be objected that Dewey would be led into accepting that any habit forming ‘experiential continuum’ is educative, whereas, to maintain the meaning of ‘growth’ as discussed earlier, he needs to discriminate between good learning experiences and bad ones. As Hook has pointed out: ‘ . . . the growth, consequently, which Dewey identifies with genuine and desirable education is a shorthand expression for the direction of change in a great variety of growths—intellectual, emotional, and moral. It excludes, therefore, the kinds of growth which interfere with

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Growth and Growing in Education 7 or reverse the direction of change in this variety of growths’ (Hook, 1959, p. 1014). Dewey puts this point as follows:

‘That a man may grow in efﬁciency as a burglar, as a gangster, or as a corrupt politician, cannot be doubted. But from the standpoint of growth as education and education as growth the question is whether growth in this direction promotes or retards growth in general. Does this form of growth create conditions for further growth, or does it set up conditions that shut off the person who has grown in this particular direction from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing growth in new directions? What is the effect of growth in a special direction upon the attitudes and habits which alone open up avenues for development in other lines?’ (ibid., p. 19). Dewey answers this question that ‘when and only when development in a particular line conduces to continuing growth does it answer to the criterion of education as growing’ (ibid., p. 20). Dewey’s concept of growth is therefore ‘deeply embedded in his theory of educative experience’ (Keall, 2010), and his idea of education is ‘the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 56). Since Dewey links the idea of education as ‘supplying the conditions which insure ‘adequacy of life’, it seems clear that ‘growth’ is a good, if not the good of education. Dewey said that ‘growth itself is the moral end’ (1920, p. 181) and that to ‘protect, sustain and direct growth is the chief ideal of education’ (1921, p. 402). If we take growth relationally then, as Dewey has indicated, we can see that he uses the idea of growth and growing normatively. This becomes clearer when growth and continuity of experience are seen in relation to ‘democracy as associated living’.

Democracy as Associated Living Dewey’s famous deﬁnition of democracy as associated living and his observation that the child lives in the social and grows within the social indicate the sense in which democracy and growth are interlinking concepts. In Chapter 8 of Democracy and Education when discussing aims in education Dewey relies on his already established deﬁnition of ‘growth’ from Chapter 4. Democracy is a moral ideal:

‘For it assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education—or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 107).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 8 R. Heilbronn As Hook has pointed out, the principle of growth, conceived as participa- tory in the process of growing, is the closest to an all-inclusive educational end for Dewey. (Hook, 1959, p. 1013). Emerson finds the idea of growth and democracy as so deeply intertwined that they are ’frequently interchange- able’ (Emerson, 1982, p. 25). Clearly, defining ‘growth’ in this way, linking it to ‘mutual intercourse’ and ‘equitably distributed interests’ is to use the term as a normative concept. Where interests are non-equitable, there is no growth. This seems neatly to side step the problem of good growth or bad growth. In Dewey’s normative definition, ‘growth’ is good and ‘no growth’ is bad. Defining democracy as a form of associated living makes a limited claim. What is at stake is a belief in deliberative processes to drive educational practices. The normative aspect is embodied in belief and hope in the rationality and morality of these deliberative processes, that in themselves they constitute a way to ensure growth and development. There is of course a long way between this concept of deliberative participation, and democracy as a system of government. There is a chasm to jump between these two notions that is not bridged in Democracy and Education, hence an oft repeated accusation of Dewey’s naivety, which some have thought illustrated by comments such as the following: ‘A society of free individuals in which all, in doing each his own work contribute to the liberation and enrichment of the lives of others, is the only environment for the normal growth to full stature. An environment in which some are limited will always in reaction create conditions that prevent the full development even of those who fancy they enjoy complete freedom for unhindered growth’ (Dewey, 1933, p. 203). Even when sympathetic to Deweyan ideas, some see a na¨ıve optimism in his belief in progressive development (e.g. Boisvert, 1999; and Rockefeller, 1991). Saito (2005) attempts to ward off such critiques in her reading of Dewey through a lens of Emersonian ‘moral perfectionism’. It is an interesting account that highlights the ‘glimmer of light’ in Dewey’s abiding faith in democracy. Saito establishes that Dewey’s project is one of hope for the future, to be achieved through education (see also Rorty, 1999, p. 4). The next part of the paper illustrates Deweyan ‘growth’ in its portrayal of a classroom situation.

PART 2: GROWTH IN ACTION In this part of the paper I draw on a scene from a documentary film entitled, Etre et Avoir (Philbert, 2002), which is set in rural France. A transcript of a particular scene follows a short introduction to the film, and this in turn is followed by a short discussion. The film takes place in a small village and is mainly centred on the schoolroom and the school master. He is solely responsible for the education of 16 children aged between 4 and 11 years of age. The film unfolds slowly, scenes from the classroom linked together with panoramic views of the countryside, snow-covered fields giving way to seasonal changes in a landscape inhabited by people and animals. Through

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Growth and Growing in Education 9 experiencing scenes slowly unfolding, the viewer comes gradually to an understanding of the place and its social dimensions. The pace and the slow accumulation of detail, echoes the way in which the children come to learn their lessons. We see them engaged with each other and the school master.4 I have chosen a scene from the film to bring to this text for its illustrative power of what Dewey means by growth in relation to the other concepts discussed above. The scene occurs half an hour into the film (about third of the way through). It involves the school master and two boys. The boys are sitting in an empty schoolroom side by side at a table with a chair-width distance between them. One (Olivier) has been crying—red cheeks, hands clasped in front of mouth, elbows on table but not leaning on them, sitting upright. His hands form a shield against his mouth. His posture indicates readiness—that is, he is upright in the chair. The second boy (Julien) is looking into the distance, one arm laying across the table in front of him, the other crooked, elbow on table and face lightly resting against his hand. He is leaning into the desk. The master is out of shot. From the direction of his voice and the camera angle he appears as though slightly in front of the viewer, and to her right. He is opposite the boys at the other side of the table and likely to be fairly close to the middle, opposite the gap in chairs. We can deduce this from the camera angle. The master is soft spoken. He sets the scene, saying why they are all there. He asks several questions before one of the boys engages. The film I viewed is sub-titled, but I have translated the dialogue directly from the French and not relied on the subtitles, which at times miss the subtlety of what is happening. We know that translation brings its own issues.5 I have left the translation deliberately ‘awkward’ at times, where the words actually said carry particular meanings pertinent to the point of this paper. Gestures and looks were significant, as in any face-to-face conversation, and I have tried to convey them as clearly as possible, in brackets and italics where appropriate. Master: Now we are leaving I wanted us to speak about your differences, especially your fight, at break time. You know what it means and why are we speaking—so that it doesn’t happen again, because it is completely useless—eh? You’re here in the same class, you’re together. There are not manyofus.6 You find ways to fight. So, there you are. If you have something to say you should say it now, we’ll say it here, and so we’ll try to sort out the problem. So? Master continues, Do you have anything to say Julien? Olivier? (Julien looks at Olivier, who is on Julien’s right. Olivier indicates ‘no’ by a slight shake of his head). Master: How did it start? What happened at the beginning? Julien: Well, we were playing tag, Master:Yes Julien: And when we caught him he fell down and he hurt his back. That’s how it began. He caught all the little ones. He hurt them. After a bit we stopped him. Then he, he started jumping on everyone. (Julien looks at Olivier who does not move, change expression or respond).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 10 R. Heilbronn Master: Were you angry? (The comment is directed to Oliver, who nods his head). Was it right to be angry with the little ones? It wasn’t their fault. Was it? (Olivier shakes his head). Was that OK? (Olivier shakes head) Can you try not to do that again? (Olivier nods). And thinking about Julien, because you were ﬁghting for quite a long time, after all. At the beginning you proved your strength, you went round and round each other (both boys smile) but then things got worse didn’t they? (Olivier smiles). What do you think about it? Julien: I let him go . . . let him go, but he wouldn’t let me go. Master: Why wouldn’t you let him go? You should say so Olivier, speak now, because then it’s over. (Oliver makes a sound, barely audible sob-like inhalation). What was going on your head that you didn’t want to let go of him? (Oliver sniffs with another sob-like inhalation). Did you want to show him that you were as strong as he is? (Olivier nods) Master: That’s surely true isn’t it? Isn’t it? Did you resist easily, or was it difﬁcult? Julien: Well . . . sometimes . . . (Master interrupts him here). Master: So sometimes, yes? (Julien nods). That’s what we have to understand. Sometimes it’s you the strongest, then it’s me. You’re the same age, the same size, you’re both strong, you wanted to show him that you are as strong as him. (Olivier says ‘yes’ very quietly, more like a gulp). Does there have to be a winner? Olivier:No Master: It doesn’t help, does it? Is it important to you (‘toi’, singular - He’s talking to Olivier, who doesn’t answer. Julien shakes his head). Perhaps it’s less important to him since he wanted to let go? What we need to say too is that this has been going on for a few days. Where does this come from? You (plural) get on well sometimes and then not at all at other times. Do you (both) want to talk about it? Is there a reason Olivier? (He doesn’t reply). What is it about Julien you can’t take? (Olivier takes his hands away from his face and takes a breath, leans on his hands. Julien turns to look at Olivier). Tell me, (short pause) calmly, what can’t you take? You can tell him, with me here, you can tell him. What don’t you like about him? (Both boys now have elbows on their tables. Olivier’s hands are in front of his mouth again. Julien is looking away and looking at his hands). Olivier: When he insults me. Master: When he insults you? (Olivier nods). OK. You see Julien (Julien turns his head slightly towards the master). Apparently it’s what you say in words that is more serious for him than what you can do with your strength. For him, it’s very important. He doesn’t feel well when you say stuff like that. (Julien turns more towards the master, listening). So, it’s easy to insult someone, a word—ordinary word or a mean word, it can hurt a lot. Perhaps that’s what’s bothering Olivier, that he feels hurt by the words that you, or someone else may say. Is that it? OK—can this end? (Neither boy answers. Olivier is crying. Julien is cracking his knuckles).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Growth and Growing in Education 11 This is almost the end of the scene, except that the master reminds the boys that they are in a class with young children. He says that they have a responsibility to be an example to the younger children and he asks them if they can be friends until they leave the school, which we know will be shortly as they will be going to the secondary school after the approaching holidays. Olivier smiles when the master asks if they can be friends and says something inaudibly through sobs. After the master asks him to repeat what he says, he replies ‘Like before’. Julien nods. The scene changes to an external shot. Some hay bales covered in black polythene ﬂapping in the wind.

DISCUSSION I have chosen this incident as it seems to me to illustrate what Dewey means by growth in the discussion in Democracy and Education.Thefilm is a text in the sense that the complex web of interconnected concepts can be read through experiencing the film, the leisurely pace of the action and the intercutting with the landscape draws the viewer into a quiet classroom, where the children seem to be open to becoming and to each other. There has been no easy resolution, such as the boys shaking hands, or even looking at each other. It’s an ambiguous ending. I leave with the impression that Olivier feels bullied by Julien and that Julien is not necessarily aware of the hurt he has caused. My impression of the two children is that Julien is tougher, in the sense that he shrugs off insults, or at least he is more familiar with experiencing them. As with any mediation situation, we cannot know the many factors that have brought two people to hostility and inability to talk to each other about what is happening. But what is significant is their being together in a form of associated living that Dewey would call democratic. Through his questioning and direction, the master shows dialogical virtues that enable the growing understanding between them, which is about relating to each other in the social space of their classroom in which they spend their days. The viewer has experienced how the master establishes the context for the discussion; enables both boys to engage by respecting both their views; develops his own understanding about what has happened; takes a stand; undertakes reconciliation based on continuing to respect both children, whilst himself taking a moral position on what has happened. Olivier who has felt bullied is able to weep, while Julien sits alongside him. Julien cannot escape what is said and what is embodied—but then he seems quite robust and game to take on a moral lesson. Later, we see Julien struggling with his maths homework which he is doing with his mother. She clips him round the ear and ridicules him for his ‘stupidity’. Soon after this we see him confidently driving a tractor, backing it up a pathway. These glimpses of Julien’s life are important to understanding what he brings to the social setting, the interaction in the classroom. The scene with Julien’s mother also illuminates his experiences in the classroom, as we have seen several scenes in which the master patiently elicits answers to questions and waits for children’s responses, whereas Julien has experienced a different mode of interaction from his mother when he is doing his maths at home. The

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 12 R. Heilbronn master is instrumental in calling on the children to help each other and in many activities in class they work collaboratively. Here for me lies the difficulty with Dewey’s notion of growth when we try to update it to our current educational context. The French school master has a personal-professional relationship with the children and plays a role in their lives that most teachers today could not. He knows them well, knows their families, lives in and within the local community, and he fully understands the context of their lives, as becomes apparent in an interview he gives towards the end of the film. His is a rural, one-roomed school, the entire primary population of the neighbourhood in the 16 pupil class. Small rural schools cannot be compared with larger schools in any country and in any case are not necessarily exempt from performativity pressures, in the current climate. Yet we have to have hope that we can remain ethical teachers, enabling the kind of growth Dewey defines. But we may wonder what teachers can do, given that they do not have the luxury of time or the familiarity and communal embeddedness of the master working in the small rural school. Dedicated teachers do what they can to teach with care and concern, to attend to the moments of pedagogical thoughtfulness or just ordinary kindness. But at what cost? We know from data the time required for the paperwork related to the auditing and how it takes its toll on the number of hours teachers work and the number leaving the profession in droves. Chris Higgins has reminded us that the problem of burn-out, and the many factors causing it, are well-documented, and that teaching is a difficult activity to sustain for long. He notices that ‘it does often turn out that it is precisely the teachers we respect the most, those whose selfless dedication to making something happen for other people is an inspiration, who burn out the fastest’ (Higgins, 2011, p. 159). Higgins’ proposal that teachers should attend to themselves and his discussion of the self-caring teacher is a powerful one. Dewey would think that the whole school culture needs to be one in which such a teacher is sustained. Higgins is talking of teaching in general, of teachers who tend to be self-sacrificing and idealistic, but his warning is even more pertinent in times of pressure from the dominant audit culture in our schools and education system.

CONCLUSION From the discussion in Part 1 of the paper and the illustration in Part 2 it is clear that growth in the metric sense and growing in the Deweyan sense are not compatible. The question confronting educators is how to make, maintain and protect an environment in which educative growing can happen. Higgins’ proposal is pertinent to the situation of teachers caught in states of exhaustion and demoralisation in the face of the performativity pressures and is a way of supporting them to withstand such difﬁculties. Thinking about examinations in new ways can also be powerful, since there is much drudgery in the testing and examination regime, for pupils and teachers. As John White points out, school examinations do little to test deep

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Growth and Growing in Education 13 understanding, blight the secondary curriculum, cause students and their families anxiety, stress teachers and do nothing to promote equity in education, since they favour families who can manipulate admission arrangements to get into ‘high performing schools’ (White, 2014). If the sole purpose of schooling were no longer skewed towards the examination regime, schools would be free to think about new ways of designing curricula. Reiss and White’s proposal (2013) for an aims-based curriculum could certainly help in creating an environment congenial to Dewey’s educative principle of growing. We can also seek out and protect those affordances we ﬁnd for growing such as in extra-curricular activities, trips and visits. We have glimmers of light in certain ‘leaky spaces’, for example, when students are able to deliberate together, such as in discussions in humanities or studying texts in literature or in drama—subjects that have recently been squeezed out of the school curriculum, but are being actively defended.7 There is hope in the quest for spaces to protect the environment for growth and growing.

Correspondence: Ruth Heilbronn, CCM, UCL Institute of Education, 20, Bedford Way, WC1H0AL, London, UK. Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1. The use of narrative forms is now common in a variety of disciplines, particularly following Walter Fisher’s work in communication theory—see for example Fisher, 1995. 2. See Ralston, 2011 for a detailed review of four notable philosophical texts on the subject. 3. A notable example is C. Wright Mills, 1966. 4. I have used ‘school master’ rather than ‘teacher’ to convey the French for a male primary school teacher (‘un maˆıtre’). 5. See for example the discussion by Raatikainen, 2012, ‘Philosophical Issues in Meaning and Trans- lation’ for coverage of some of the major issues. 6. The master says ‘on n’est pas tres` nombreuse’. The use of ‘on’ can be equivalent to ‘we’, though commonly also used as the impersonal third person. I base this translation on the way the master engages himself within the situation, sees himself as part of what is happening. 7. We can draw on the valuable advocacy for the arts and humanities by Martha Nussbaum and Maxine Greene. See particularly Greene, 1981 and Nussbaum, 2010.

DEWEY REFERENCES The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (ed.) Jo Ann Boydston. (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, Southern Illinois Press). 2nd Release e-edition. Individual titles and dates of texts are given. Abbreviations refer to: EW – Early Works: 1882–1898 MW – Middle Works: 1899–1924 LW – Later Works: 1925–1953

(1897) A Study of Ethics. EW, Vol. 4. (1906) Essays: Experience and Objective Idealism. MW, Vol. 3. (1916) Democracy and Education. MW, Vol. 9. (1920) Essays: Reconstruction in Philosophy. MW, Vol. 12.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 14 R. Heilbronn (1921) Contribution to Encyclopaedia and Dictionary of Education: Aims and Ideals of Education. MW, Vol. 13. (1929) The Sources of a Science of Education. LW, Vol. 5. (1933) Essays: The Need for a Philosophy of Education. LW, Vol. 9. (1936) The Quest for Certainty. LW, Vol. 4. (1938) Experience and Education. LW, Vol. 13.

REFERENCES

Aronwitch, S. and Giroux, H. A. (2004) Education Still Under Siege (Amherst, MA, Bergin and Garvey) Ball, S. J. (1999) Global Trends in Educational Reform and the Struggle for the Soul of the Teacher! Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex at Brighton, 2–5 September 1999. Available online at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001212.htm (accessed 30 November 2016). Ball, S.J. (2003) The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity, Journal of Education Policy, 18.2, pp. 215–228. Ball, S. J., Maguire, M. and Macrae, S. (1997) The Post-16 Education Market: Ethics, Interests and Survival, BERA Annual Conference, University of York, September (pp. 11–14) Bernstein, R.J. (2010, The Pragmatic Turn (Oxford, Wiley). Bloom, A. (1987) The Closing of the American Mind (New York City, Simon and Schuster Inc.). Boisvert, R. (1999) The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Dewyan Pragmatism, in: A. Haskins and D. Semple (eds.), Dewey Reconfigured (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press), pp. 157–163. Emerson, J. G. (1982) John Dewey’s Concept of Education as a Growth Process (Meerut City, India, Anu Prakashan). Fisher, W. R. (1995) Narration, Knowledge, and the Possibility of Wisdom, in: W. Fisher and R. Goodman (eds.) Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines (Suny Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences) (New York, State University of New York Press). Gewirtz, S., Ball, S. J. and Bowe, R. (1995) Markets, Choice and Equity in Education (Buckingham, Open University Press), Greene, M. (1981) Aesthetic Literacy in General Education, in: 80th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press), pp. 115–141. Higgins, C. (2011) The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Oxford, Wiley Blackwell) Hirsch, Jr., E. D. (1987) Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know (Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin). Hook, S. (1959) John Dewey - Philosopher of Growth, Journal of Philosophy, Inc., 56.26, pp. 1010–1018. Keall, C. (2010) Exploring the Nature and Educational Significance of Dewey’s Notion of Growth, in: Panel: The Centrality of Dewey’s Philosophy of Growth: Clarifying Dewey’s Commitment to Growth in Ethics and Education. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 37th Annual Meeting, University of North Carolina. Kliebard, H.M. (2004) The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 3rd Edition (Abingdon and New York, Routledge Falmer). McMurtry, J. (1991) Education and the Market Model, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 25.2, pp. 209–217 Nussbaum, M. (2010) Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). Philbert, N. (2002) Etre et Avoir, Curzon Aritifical Eye Films. Popp, J. (2015) John Dewey’s Theory of Growth and the Ontological View of Society, Studies in Philosophy of Education, 34.1, pp. 45–62. Raatikainen, P. (2012) Philosophical Issues in Meaning and Translation, COLLeGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 7, pp. 1796–2986. Ralston, S. (2011) A More Practical Pedagogical Ideal: Searching for a Criterion of Growth, Educational Theory, 61.3 pp. 351–364.

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Ravitch, D. (2000) Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York, Simon & Schuster). Reiss, M. and White, J. (2013) An Aims Based Curriculum: The Signiﬁcance of Human Flourishing for Schools (London, IoE Press). Rockefeller, S. (1991) John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York, Columbia University Press). Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford, Basil Blackwell). Rorty, R. (1999) Education as Socialization and as Individualization, in: Philosophy and Social Hope (New York, Penguin Books), pp. 104–113. Saito, S. (2005) The Gleam of Light(New York, Fordham University Press). Schrecker, E. (2010) The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University (New York, London, The New Press). Simich, J. T. R. (1978) Radicalism vs. Liberalism: C. Wright Mills’ Critique of John Dewey’s Ideas. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 37.4, pp. 413–430. Simmons, M. J. (1985) Review Article - John Dewey’s Concept of Education as a Growth Process, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 21.3, pp. 455–461. Watkins, W. (2012) The Assault on Public Education (New York, Columbia, Teachers College Press). White, J. (2014) Who Needs Examinations? A Story of Climbing Ladders and Dodging Snakes (London, IoE Press). Wright Mills, C. (1966) Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (New York, Paine-Whitman).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2018

Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work: Challenging the Neo-Liberal Educational Agenda

VASCO D’AGNESE

In my paper, I attempt to accomplish a twofold task: ﬁrst, to argue that in order to understand important features of Deweyan work, a thorough analysis of the roles that uncertainty, courage and imagination play in Deweyan thought is required. Second, based on such an analysis, I try to show that such features are essential for education to happen. Moreover, courage, imagination and uncertainty taken together work to frame an understanding of education and learning as challenging and even risky enterprises. I develop my analysis against the current, ‘ofﬁcial’ picture of education promoted worldwide, one in which courage, imagination and uncertainty are exactly the features that come to be eclipsed by the neo-liberal educational agenda. Thus, I claim that education with its roots in imagination and courage is directed toward ‘unattained possibilities’ as its own, proper aim.

INTRODUCTION When analysing Deweyan work, risk, courage and imagination are not the first issues that come to mind. This is true for two reasons: first, Dewey did not systematically discuss them, as he did, for instance, issues such as democracy, inquiry, experience or art. Second, when analysing such issues by extrapolating them from works devoted to develop other arguments, the three terms occur infrequently in Dewey’s work. Nonetheless, it is my contention that without an understanding of the role that courage, imagination and uncertainty play in education and thinking, an important part of Dewey’s endeavour remains hidden. Specifically, we run the risk of losing sight of both the inner force structuring learning and education, namely, ‘liv[ing] forward’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 12) while ‘pointing to the new possibilities’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 312), and the risk entailed in the very activity of thinking. As Dewey stated in Democracy and Education: ‘All thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure’ (Dewey, 1930 [1916], p. 174).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 V.d’Agnese This is because the lack of certainty, and the aspiration to move toward new possibilities entails courage. In the face of the unknown, of an ‘uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable’ world (Dewey, 1929 [1925], p. 43), we have no guarantee of success. Moreover, in attempting to imagine and enact new possibilities, in pursuing new paths, we may lose what we have already acquired, for learning and education do not work cumulatively. Such an idea of education seems far removed from the current, ‘ofﬁ- cial’ picture of education and the discourse about learning which dominate schooling and educational practices worldwide. This neo-liberal framework works to promote a picture of education in which pivotal educational features simply disappear. As I discuss below, teachers’ and students’ subjec- tivities are being shaped by such a neo-liberal framework (Ball, 2003), and education in its own right and form is eclipsed (Biesta, 2004, 2006, 2010). Such a shift also produces a kind of ‘de-professionalisation’ of teaching (Apple, 2000) and an impoverishment of teachers’ capacity ‘to make autonomous judgement about curriculum and pedagogy in the interests of their actual pupils’ (Connell, 2013, pp. 107–108). Importantly, it also comes to undermine students’ capacity to autonomously imagine new ways of being, acting, thinking and living together (English, 2016; Masschelein and Simons, 2008). While sharing such analysis and concerns, I adopt a slightly different approach. It is my contention that, for a ‘learning apparatus’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2008) to work, three particular educational features must be tamed and, in a sense, erased from educational processes—imagination, courage and uncertainty. Drawing from Deweyan work, then, I wish to show that such features are essential for education to happen. Moreover, such features, taken together, work to frame an understanding of education and learning as challenging and even risky enterprises. Paraphrasing Dewey, education might best be characterised as ‘a venture into the unknown’ (Dewey, 1980 [1934], p. 272), one in which the self is pushed to leap beyond the known and the safe toward the broader territory of the uncertain. In this sense, education, sinking its roots in imagination and courage, is directed toward ‘unattained possibilities’ (Dewey 1929 [1925], p. 182) as its own, proper aim. The paper is organised in four sections, committed to analysing features and consequences of the neo-liberal educational agenda (ﬁrst section), uncertainty and unpredictability in the world and education (second section), courage and risk as essential for education to happen (third section), and the role imagination plays in education (fourth section).

THE NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE At least since the Lisbon Memorandum on Lifelong Learning in Europe (EU, 2000), and the 2001 reauthorisation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind) in the US, education on both sides of the Atlantic has been increasingly framed in terms of a neo-liberal rallying cry (Alexander, 2011; Apple, 2000; Au, 2011; Ball, 2003; Biesta, 2015; Clark, 2012; Connell, 2013; Fielding and Moss, 2011). Through this shift,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work 3 although certain ‘skills’ and ‘capabilities’ are moved to the fore, others are increasingly marginalised. In addition, it has been argued that by the very use of such terms and language, an entire politics of education is being enacted (Biesta, 2006; Masschelein and Simons, 2008). When looking at documents, recommendations and publications of the main agencies and institutions governing education worldwide, we can see that by using the same language the concept of education becomes severely reduced. Indeed, powerful institutions such as the European Commission, the OECD, and the US Department of Education frame their performative educational discourse in terms of ‘training and basic skills’ (EU, 2016), ‘student achievement and competitiveness’ (US Department of Education, 2016), and ‘knowledge management [ . . . and] students’ performance’ (OECD, 2014, thus reframing education in terms of human capital theory (Olssen and Peters, 2005) and curriculum in terms of efficiency protocols (Au, 2011). A full discussion of this discourse is beyond the scope of this paper so that in this section I will furnish three instances of this agenda, to illuminate its strategy. Specifically, a passage from the Lisbon Memorandum on Lifelong Learning (EU, 2000); the OECD’s video presenting PISA—the OECD’s Programme for International Students Assessment (OECD, 2016); and a passage from a Royal Society of Arts Report on spiritual, social, moral and cultural education in the UK (Royal Society of Arts, 2016). In the Lisbon Memorandum on Lifelong Learning we find the following: ‘Europe has indisputably moved into the Knowledge Age . . . This means not simply that individuals must adapt to change, but equally that established ways of doing things must change too . . . Therefore, Europe’s education and training systems are at the heart of the coming changes. They too, must adapt’ (EU, 2000, p. 3, emphasis added). Here, clearly the emphasis on adaptability shows a conception of education that is not framed in terms of something capable of autonomously establishing its aims and purposes—or, in Dewey’s words, as something having ‘no end beyond itself’, something being ‘its own end’ (Dewey, 1930 [1916], p. 59). Instead, the passage notes that both education and individuals ‘must adapt’. This view clearly displays a conception of education, communities and individuals as subservient to needs framed from above. Change, which is a pivotal educational category, is not conceived as a tension passing through individuals and communities, an open field of possibilities, a moving force having its roots in the free sharing of one’s projects, de- sires, aspirations. Quite the opposite, change is viewed as top-down. In this document, a silent but powerful educational dominion is at work. The same logic underpins the OECD’s video presenting PISA, PISA- Measuring student success around the world (OECD, 2016). I quote some significant passages and then comment: ‘The OECD brings together 34 countries with the aim of developing better policies for better life . . . PISA shows countries where they stand, in relation to other countries and by themselves in how effectively they educate their children. It also helps government, educators

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 4 V.d’Agnese and parents track their country’s progress to a more successful education system . . . Analysts then look at PISA test results . . . and try to determine the main characteristics of the successful education systems . . . Once a proﬁle of a successful system emerges it can be used as a model for others’. I believe passages like the one quoted above deserve close scrutiny. In particular, the statement that OECD’s policies are developed ‘for [a] better life’ is anything but innocent, even if at ﬁrst glance, unproblematic. In claiming authority over what life should look like, the OECD takes upon itself the role of setting, determining such a life (d’Agnese, 2017b). As in the previous document, the picture is one in which the role of students, teachers and even policy-makers is to follow and adapt. The other issue to highlight is that of ‘measur[ing] whether 15-year- olds around the world are well prepared to participate in society’ (ibid.). Such participation is a complex matter. It cannot be predetermined so it can be translated into a unique set of assessable competences. Moreover, focusing only on the West, there are very different ideas about what is considered a ‘good society’ and what it means to be ‘a good citizen’ (Biesta, 2006; Giroux, 1981; Torres, 1998). PISA acts as a kind of mould through which both society and education are adapted, shaped and levelled out worldwide. It promotes ‘a global space of equivalence’ (Shahjahan, 2011, p. 677) through which countries, schools and subjects taught are ranked and organised, pushed into an on-going competition directed towards the ‘best’ learning outcomes; a competition that risks leaving behind priceless educational features, Indeed, ‘ . . . the requirement of schools to develop the broader human qualities of their pupils has become side-lined due to the overwhelming pressure placed on them to deliver better exam results’ (Royal Society of Arts, 2016). If education is not just a matter of reproduction and adaptation, and schooling is not just the place where such a reproduction is delivered, a different approach from the one promoted by the current neo-liberal agenda is required. In what follows, drawing on Dewey I attempt to sketch what I see as the three necessary features of such an approach, namely, courage, imagination and uncertainty. I begin by analysing the role uncertainty plays in education.

UNCERTAINTY AND UNPREDICTABILITY IN THE WORLD AND EDUCATION The relationship between change and stability as related to existence is the focus of Chapter 2 of Experience and Nature. This discussion is helpful in illuminating the role of unpredictability in education. Dewey states: ‘We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of sufﬁciencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work 5 uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of the parable. We may recognize them separately but we cannot divide them, for unlike wheat and tares they grow from the same root’ (Dewey, 1929 [1925], p. 48).

Here Dewey accomplishes two diverse tasks, both rooted in his philosophy of nature and existence. Initially a faith in human capacities to live meaningfully is foregrounded. The mood marking these words is that of a lively process of discovering, of an adventure—and, indeed, in Democracy and Education, Dewey compared thinking precisely to ‘an adventure’ (1930 [1916], p. 174). However, time and again Deweyan emphasis is put on the difficulty and even the impossibility of definitively dividing the certain from the uncertain, defects from qualities, change from permanence. This is true for ‘they grow from the same root’. We may say that, in attempting to make a sharp division between certain and uncertain, we run the risk of cutting their common vital root. As Dewey states, we may recognise change and permanence separately ‘but we cannot divide them’. Something unpredictable always remains at the core of thinking and acting. Even if human beings are able to act in meaningful ways, pursuing and realising their aims, dividing qualities and defects efficiently, such a division is merely functional: it is valid in the here and now, for circumscribed purposes. No general, objective division can be affected. This is true for in Deweyan transactionalism we only come to know something by means of action—and, indeed, in Deweyan transactionalism, knowledge is recognising the relationships between actions and outcomes (Dewey, 1929 [1925], pp. 10–12; Dewey, 1929, p. 194). So we may say that in any thought or act, something radically unpredictable lies at its root. However, to be faithful to Deweyan educational philosophy, uncertainty and danger are also the door to creativity and the future. As Dewey states, ‘thought . . . is creative—an incursion into the novel’ (1930 [1916], p. 186). The passage importantly also works to undermine a final and permanent understanding of living, in that the ‘impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences . . . and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities’ which the world is, is always beyond our comprehension. Negatively put, understandings are always precarious. Positively put, such a beyondness of the world is at the very same time, the root of beauty and interest and moreover, a reminder against any totalitarian thought—there is always more to world than thinking can capture. The passage has important educational implications. As a first consequence, when teaching and educating, one has to bear in mind the uncertainty underpinning any act one accomplishes. This call towards humility works to undermine that kind of ‘straightforwardness’ which pervades education in a high-stakes testing culture, where students experience pre- defined changes achievable through acquiring ‘skills’. With change and uncertainty located at the ‘vital’ root of the world and of education, the aims of learning should also point towards uncertainty and even unpredictability. This is not to underestimate the importance of acquiring essential

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 6 V.d’Agnese content and skills. Without them socialisation and the introduction of newborns into a given culture and society would be impossible—learning also requires memorisation and repetition of gestures. The problem concerns the nature and the place such activities should have in learning processes. Learning has eminently to do with unexpected situations, for learning, in Dewey’s understanding, is at the very same time grounded in and directed towards uncertainty (d’Agnese, 2017a). The aim of learning is not to un- earth preceding conditions, to ﬁnd a ground or to discover the ‘ﬁrst beginning’ of perceived objects and situations. Instead, it is future-oriented and prospective:

‘ . . . the ultimate need for the inquiry is found in the necessity of discovering what is to be done, or of developing a response suitably adapted to the requirements of a situation’ (Dewey, 1929 [1925], p. 338).

We begin to understand what a problem or a situation is in ﬁnding and testing the possible solutions to the problems encountered, which is one of the consequences of Dewey’s shift from philosophy as analytic thinking to philosophising as pragmatic transactionalism. Learning is not so much about discovering, but about pushing knowledge—and living—forward. That is why learning in a sense produces uncertainty, for it pushes the subject being educated forward, toward unknown—and sometimes even unknowable—territories. With unpredictability at the core of any situation, there needs to be a quality of real newness for both teachers and educators. This leads to a kind of paradox: in order to enhance and promote learning, teachers and educators should create situations in which they do not master and control all of the features. Here, I am not endorsing a kind of continuous unstructured learning, one in which teachers have no awareness about their position and activities and the necessary asymmetry between them and their students. Such teaching would be senseless if not irresponsible. Teachers must be aware of what students are about, to exercise the necessary degree of control on classroom activities. They must be capable and competent. But discussion should not be limited to the kinds of capability and knowledge needed to deal with situations, for situations, in the Deweyan framework, are always already behind and beyond knowledge, with knowledge being dependent on situation (Dewey, 1938, p. 68). Put slightly differently, even if teachers were capable of mastering and controlling all the features of educational situations—which, as I have argued, is theoretically and practically impossible—this would not be the most desirable educational situation, for we would lose the opportunity to make room for newness—what Dewey calls ‘a new birth in the world’ (1980 [1934], p. 267). We would just be on the right track for achieving something pre-established. The impossibility of fully mastering a situation is also at the basis of the relationship between a ‘universe of experience’ and ‘a universe of discourse’ as Dewey states in his Logic. Consider the following passage:

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work 7 ‘A universe of experience is the precondition of a universe of discourse. Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight or coherence of any designated distinction or relation. The universe of experience surrounds and regulates the universe of discourse but never appears as such within the latter’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 68).

The passage is part of the wider discussion about the role that the concept of ‘qualitative’ plays in knowledge, and it is phrased in three statements, all attempting to explicate the dependency of discursive knowledge upon a non-discursive universe.1 The key point in my view is Dewey’s statement that, ‘The universe of experience surrounds and regulates the universe of discourse but never appears as such within the latter’ (ibid.). That is to say that the regulating and controlling condition of any discourse cannot be translated in discursive terms; in other words, that which con- trols every discourse is out of discourse itself, out of the very possibility of being expressed in and through discourse. Such a non-discursive universe powerfully influences any discourse we stage—both scientific and non-scientific discourses. We can hardly make sense of arguments being discussed when the non-discursive context of the situation is not present in our mind. In other words, in order to understand a thing as such and such, we have to imagine the context in which such a thing stands, its possible meanings and the interactions between such a thing, ourselves and the situation at hand. In Dewey’s words, without the ‘controlling presence’, of such a ‘universe of experience . . . there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight or coherence of any designated distinction or relation’ (ibid.). Not only is the extent to which something matters determined by something out of discursive conditions, even the ‘coherence’, the internal consistency of discursive knowledge, does not stand on its own ground; rather, it is controlled by something external to its boundaries—and in this sense Dewey time and again stated the priority of experience over knowledge and consciousness (1929 [1925], pp. 11, 22; 1917, pp. 47–48). Of course, this is not to deny Deweyan firm faith in inquiry and intelligent action as a means to interact with environment thus creating meaningful existence. In Deweyan understanding, the subject is empowered to reflect on experience and to use this reflection to evolve new ways of acting, thus pushing experience forward. Rather, along with and as a part of such a faith, Dewey disclosed an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. Such an understanding has important educational implications. If schooling is to be not just the place where given content is learned in order to manage given tasks, it should be where space is made for unstructured activities and for new experience to happen. For learning to occur, teachers have also to create something which, to some extent, is unknowable in advance; something they cannot predict and control in all its features; something which by necessity has to do with risk, imagination and courage, both on the side of teachers and students—an argument I develop in what follows.

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COURAGE AND RISK AS ESSENTIAL FOR EDUCATION TO HAPPEN Given such premises, how is uncertainty tied to courage? And what is the role of risk in Deweyan work and education and learning at large? One could reasonably conclude that uncertainty requires caution—and, indeed, caution and attentiveness, are pivotal qualities for educators and teachers. However, in what follows I argue that in order to face, handle and work with uncertainty, which is the kernel of educational processes, courage is required. Such courage goes hand in hand with qualities of patience, perseverance, tenacity and awareness. These qualities are the opposite of what is needed by merely passively taking on work as it is presented and executing given tasks—a stance, as argued in the first section, which underpins much of current educational policy framework and learning discourse. As a first step, let us consider a passage from Democracy and Education, which explicitly relates courage, perseverance and education: ‘A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time. But this is not a reason for nominally accepting one educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to another. It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it persistently’ (Dewey, 1930 [1916], p. 161). In this passage, Dewey calls for a deep and wide ‘reorganization of education’, a reorganisation that is both theoretical and practical, one that encompasses all levels of educational processes, ranging from schooling to curriculum, to the teachers’ role. From the beginning of the passage, the emphasis is put on the difficulty and the slowness of such challenging work: it is ‘a slow work’, one which ‘can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time’. A work requiring perseverance and, we may add, even remarkable patience in tolerating failures and frustrations. However, at the end of the passage, Dewey puts courage as a basis for such a work: courage has to sustain the entire movement of such a reorganisation. This is true because given realities which remain unchallenged depend on a kind of silent, widespread approval, and on the sturdy force of routine. Yet, this is not the whole story. Longevity and duration are not always connected to what is right, nor always to efficacy. Duration may also be the arrest of that experimental attitude towards which schooling should be oriented, where experimental is taken in its broad and deep sense, of something yet un-experienced, something unknown—something requiring both intelligence and courage to be pursued. Significantly, the link between courage and intelligence, on the one hand, and courage and persistence, on the other, is explicitly made by Dewey. The former is put forward, again, in Democracy and Education, when Dewey urges the task of ‘develop[ing] a courageous intelligence’ (ibid., p. 373). This ‘courageous intelligence’, in being oriented toward the future, in being deeply connected to forecasting and imagination, has to do, by definition, with risk and uncertainty. This is not an isolated passage in Deweyan work;

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work 9 in Human Nature and Conduct, in fact, Dewey calls for ‘the courage of intelligence to go deeper than either tradition or immediate impulse goes’ (Dewey, 1922, p. 171). The connection between courage and perseverance, is developed in Ethical Principles Underlying Education, where we find the following: ‘The kind of character we hope to build up through our education is one which not only has good intentions, but which insists upon carrying them out . . . The individual must have the power to stand up and count for something in the actual conflicts of life. He must have initiative, insistence, persistence, courage and industry’ (Dewey, 1903, p. 29). Carrying out ‘good intentions’, ‘to stand up and count for something in the actual conflicts of life’ requires a whole range of qualities, courage being the founding one. Courage is the force moving all the others, the force without which other qualities are lifeless. Courage, by means of an unexpected comparison, is also implied in pursuing the experimental method. We find such a connection in Experience and Nature, when Dewey speaks about the task and the nature of ‘empirical naturalism’: ‘Empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treasured. An empirical method which remains true to nature does not ‘save’; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world’ (Dewey, 1929 [1925], p. iii). This passage, although concerned with explaining what the aims of the empirical method are, can be taken as a paradigm of what education is about and of what the guiding force of education has to be, namely, ‘creat[ing] new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world’. Para- phrasing Dewey, education does not ‘save; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. Education and learning do not have the task of representing nor reproducing anything. Education and learning are eminently creative processes, processes generating ideas, gestures, values, ways of behaving ‘in the face of the perplexities of a new world’. That is why education and learning are risky tasks, for newness, in being unknown, entails risk at its very core, and the world is itself ‘uncannily unstable’ (ibid., p. 42); the world is, in Deweyan words, ‘a scene of risk’ (ibid., p. 42). Risk and danger, then, are involved in our relationship to the world from the very beginning, and courage is required both to face given situations and to produce newness. If education is the very process leading newborns and adults to learn both how to handle and face the given, and how to create the new, it requires courage to be developed and sustained. Courage, in this sense, is a kind of cognitive and even professional virtue of educationalists at all levels, from educators to researchers, from teachers to policy-makers: courage to put one’s own presuppositions and ideas at risk, and to risk

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 10 V.d’Agnese oneself in pursuing one’s aims and ideas; courage to challenge given ideas and perspectives and to be challenged by others’ ideas and perspectives. This is so for pursuing new realities always requires courage and the capacity to imagine such realities—an argument I develop in what follows.

IMAGINATION The role of imagination in both Deweyan thought and education cannot be overestimated. Imagination, as we read in Democracy and Education ‘is the medium of appreciation in every field’, that which ‘makes any activity more than mechanical’ (Dewey, 1930 [1916], p. 276). Imagination, as distinct from ‘imaginary’ is then deeply involved in the perception of things and in the understanding of meanings. Imagination, in being ‘a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation’ (ibid.) is also the means by which we deepen and penetrate the core of a situation; it is not fantasy, nor a means to escape reality, but instead the very means by which we may conceive of reality. If the word ‘essence’ is not misleading us in understanding Dewey, one might be tempted to say that through imagination we may achieve the ‘essence’ of a situation. Imagination is also the basis on which inquiry and knowledge develop. Again, in Democracy and Education we find a passage in which Dewey crucially discusses the relationship between knowledge, symbols and imagination: ‘Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would be no road from a direct activity to representative knowledge; for it is by imagination that symbols are translated over into a direct meaning and integrated with a narrower activity to expand and enrich it’ (Dewey, 1930 [1916], pp. 277–278). The passage is pivotal because here Dewey establishes imagination as the junction at which first we can pass from activity to knowledge and second we can pass from symbols to meanings. In other words, without imagination, we would not have any knowledge at all, and symbols would be dead signs. The full import of ‘direct activity’ and the translation and integration of ‘symbols’ into ‘direct meaning’, is in fact accomplished by imagination. Moreover, to the extent to which the translation of symbols into direct meaning is the basis for language and communication, we could say that, without ‘the accompanying play of imagination . . . there would be no road’ to language and communication themselves. Otherwise stated, imagination is the very basis by which the activity of constructing knowledge and communication can occur. This is not an isolated passage. Almost 20 years later, in Art as Experience, Dewey would return to the issue, expanding his previous understanding. Here, when discussing the function of imagination, we find a passage that removes any doubt about the importance of such a faculty: ‘Imagination . . . designates a quality that animates and pervades all processes of making and observation. It is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and generous

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Courage, Uncertainty and Imagination in Deweyan Work 11 blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world . . . There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination . . . [imagination is] the welding together of all elements, no matter how diverse in ordinary experience, into a new and completely unified experience’ (Dewey, 1980 [1934], p. 267). The passage is clear enough in itself. Nonetheless, some points should be highlighted. Above all, when reading that imagination ‘animates and pervades all processes of making and observation’, we cannot help noting that without such a ‘quality’ we would be lifeless things. Observation, namely the simple act of looking at something, recognising something as such and such, requires imagination to be performed. Similarly, any making— making being understood as any and every action we enact—cannot occur without imagination. This is because it is only through imagination that things come to ‘compose an integral whole’. However, the most important part of the passage lies in the third statement, namely, ‘[imagination] is the large and generous blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world’. In order to understand the passage we have to bear in mind that in Deweyan work, the ‘contact’ between mind and world is highly significant and we may even say that the most revolu- tionary Deweyan insights are exactly about the new understanding of such a contact (Biesta and Burbules, 2003; Hansen, 2009). In a sense, ourselves and the environment come into the world together by such a contact. Then, as the passage states, only by means of imagination, through its ‘large and generous blending of interests . . . mind comes in contact with the world’. This is why imagination gives unity to experience, ‘welding together’ its heterogeneous elements ‘into a new and completely unified experience’. Through such a passage we come to see that, inquiry, making, observing, meaning construction and even our very contact with the world all stand on imagination. Of course, this is not to say that imagination in itself resolves such processes. Rather, this is to say that without imagination we could not perform any of these processes. Imagination importantly is also involved in ‘conscious experience’, in that, ‘...allconscious experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality. . . . Imagination is the only gateway through which . . . meanings can find their way into a present interaction; or, rather, as we have just seen, the conscious adjustment of the new and the old is imagination’ (Dewey, 1980 1934], p. 272, emphasis added). Moreover, ‘experience is rendered conscious by means of that fusion of old meanings and new situations that transfigures both (a transformation that defines imagination)’ (ibid., p. 275). What strikes me in these passages is that experience comes to consciousness neither by means of a type of reflective agency that is complete in itself, nor through inquiry. Rather, the fusion of old meanings and new situations comes about through imagination. Only after imagination has done its work, are we able to think reflectively

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 12 V.d’Agnese and to perform inquiry. Only after imagination has brought a new situation to the fore are we able to learn anything. In drawing my paper to a conclusion, I wish to briefly linger on another role of imagination, a role which in turn allows me to connect the analysis of Deweyan work to a critique of the neo-liberal educational agenda. Such a role is the capacity of imagination to produce ‘a new birth in the world’ (ibid., p. 267). Such a task is quintessentially educational in that education is an ‘emancipation and enlargement of experience’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 156). We can see therefore that without an ‘imaginative vision of life’ (Dewey, 1930 [1916], p. 336), the Deweyan call towards growth and education would work in emptiness, because we would not have meanings to conceive of, nor the capacity to act to project them into the future. Such a projection may be risky, for, ‘Uncertainty is primarily a practical matter. It signifies uncertainty of the issue of present experiences; these are fraught with future peril as well as inherently objectionable. Action to get rid of the objectionable has no warrant of success and is itself perilous’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 223). However, the only way to evade such a risk is by relying on pre- established projects and aims, as we are supposed to do in the neo-liberal educational agenda—an agenda through which educational agency, both of student and teacher comes to be erased (Biesta, 2010; d’Agnese, 2018). In contrast, putting oneself at risk with ‘no warrant of success’, imagining ‘a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 69) is the educational endeavour par excellence. This is what a neo-liberal ‘learning discourse’ attempts to eclipse, and I believe it is exactly what teachers, researchers, educators and even policy-makers should find the courage and the perseverance to imagine and enact.2

Correspondence: Vasco d’Agnese, Department of Psychology, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, viale Ellittico 31, 81100 Caserta CE, Italy. Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1. For more on this, see Alexander, 1987, p. 93 and Garrison et al., 2016, p. 64. 2. This article is a reworked version of a paper I presented at the Dewey Conference ‘John Dewey’s “Democracy and Education” 100 Years On: Past, Present, and Future Relevance’ held in Cambridge, September–October 2016. I am grateful to Christine Doddington for her invitation to contribute to this issue, and I would like to thank her, Ruth Heilbronn and Rupert Higham for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to colleagues attending the Conference for giving me helpful advices about the topics discussed.

REFERENCES

Alexander, R. (2011) Evidence, Rhetoric and Collateral Damage: The Problematic Pursuit of ‘World Class’ Standards, Cambridge Journal of Education, 41.3, pp. 265–286. Alexander, T.M. (1987) John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feelings (Albany, NY, State of University New York Press).

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Apple, M. W. (2000) Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (New York, Routledge). Au, W. (2011) Teaching under the New Taylorism: High Stakes Testing and the Standardization of the 21st Century Curriculum, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43.1, pp. 25–45. Ball, S.J. (2003) The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity, Journal of Education Policy, 18, pp. 215–228. Biesta, G.J.J. (2004) Against Learning. Reclaiming a Language for Education in an Age of Learning, Nordisk Pedagogik, 23, pp. 70–82. Biesta, G.J.J. (2006) Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers). Biesta, G.J.J. (2007) Why ‘What Works’ Won’t Work. Evidence-Based Practice and the Democratic Deficit of Educational Research, Educational Theory, 57.1, pp. 1–22. Biesta, G.J.J. (2010) Why ‘What Works’ Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-based Education to Value-Based Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29, pp. 491–503. Biesta, G.J.J. (2015) Resisting the Seduction of the Global Education Measurement Industry: Notes on the Social Psychology of PISA, Ethics and Education, 10.3, pp. 348–360. Biesta, G.J.J. and Burbules N.C. (2003) Pragmatism and Educational Research (Boston, MA, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). Connell, R. (2013) The Neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and its Consequences, Critical Studies in Education, 54.2, pp. 99–112. d’Agnese, V. (2017a) The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking: Education and Subject in John Dewey, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 51.1 pp. 73–88. d’Agnese, V. (2017b) Reclaiming Education in the Age of PISA. Challenging OECD’s Educational Order (London, Routledge). d’Agnese, V. (2018) Newness and Human Disclosure in Dewey and Arendt: Challenging Neoliberal Educational Agenda, Policy Futures in Education, early view, pp. 1–14. Dewey, J. (1903) The Ethical Principles Underlying Education (Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press). Dewey, J. (1910) How We Think (Boston, New York, and Chicago: D.C. Heath & Co). Dewey, J. (1917) The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, in: J. Dewey, A.W. Moore, H. Chapman Brown, G. Mead, H. Boyd, H. Waldgrave Stuart, J. Hayden Tufts, and H. M. Kallen (Eds.) Creative Intelligence. Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York, Henry Holt and Company), pp. 3–69. Dewey, J. (1922) Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York, Henry Holt and Company). Dewey, J. (1929) The Quest for Certainty: a Study of the Relation between Knowledge and Action (New York, Minton, Balch & Company). Dewey, J. (1929 [1925]) Experience and Nature (London, George Allen & Unwin). Dewey, J. (1930 [1916]) Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, The MacMillan Company). Dewey, J. (1980 [1934]) Art as Experience (New York, Perigee Books). Dewey, J. (1938) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, Henry Holt and Company). English, A. (2016) Dialogic Teaching and Moral Learning: Self-critique, Narrativity, Community and ‘Blind Spots’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50.2, pp. 160–176. EU (2000) Lisbon Memorandum on Lifelong Learning (Brussels, EU). An online resource available at: http://arhiv.acs.si/dokumenti/Memorandum_on_Lifelong_Learning.pdf (accessed: 10 April 2018). EU (2016) Education and training webpage. An online resource available at: http://ec.europa.eu/ education/ (accessed: 10 April 2018). Fielding, M. and Moss, P. (2011) Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative (London, Routledge). Garrison, J., Neubert, S. and Reich, K. (2016) Democracy and Education Reconsidered. Dewey after One Hundred Years (London, Routledge). Giroux, H.A. (1981) Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling (Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press). Hansen, D.T. (2009) Dewey and Cosmopolitanism, E&C/Education & Culture, 25.2, pp. 126–140.

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Masschelein, J. and Simons, M. (2008) The Governmentalization of Learning and the Assemblage of Apparatus, Educational Theory, 58.4, pp. 391–415. OECD (2014) PISA 2012 Results: What Students Know and Can Do (Volume I, Revised edition) Student Performance in Mathematics, Reading and Science. An online resource available at: https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264208780-en (accessed: 10 April 2018). OECD (2016) PISA homepage. Video PISA – Measuring Student Success around the World.An online resource available at: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa (accessed: 10 April 2018). Olssen, M. and M. Peters. (2005) Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism, Journal of Education Policy, 20.3, pp. 313–345. Royal Society of Arts (2016) Schools with Soul: A New Approach to Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cul- tural Education. An online resource available at: https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications- and-articles/reports/schools-with-soul-a-new-approach-to-spiritual-moral-social-and-cultural- education (accessed: 10 April 2018). Shahjahan R.A. (2011) Decolonizing the Evidence-based Education and Policy Movement: Reveal- ing the Colonial Vestiges in Educational Policy, Research, and Neoliberal Reform, Journal of Education Policy, 26.2, pp. 181–206. Torres, C. A. (1998) Democracy, Education and Multiculturalism. Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World (Boston, MA, Rowman and Littleﬁeld). UK Department of Education (2016). An online resource available at: https://www.gov.uk/ government/organisations/department-for-education (accessed: 10 April 2018). US Department of Education (2016). An online resource available at: http://www.ed.gov/ (accessed: 10 April 2018).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2018

Devil, Deceiver, Dupe: Constructing John Dewey from the Right

KELLEY M. KING

The far right in the United States has gained international visibility and power by promulgating its ideas using multiple media sources. This paper considers contemporary right-wing representations of John Dewey as found on English-language internet websites. The author employs discourse analytic methods to address the questions—‘How is John Dewey constructed in right-wing internet discourse?’ and ‘By what means has the Right come to construct Dewey in this way?’ Elements of the internet discourse are related to texts that helped shape it. The paper demonstrates that far right-wing websites construct Dewey and his ideas as the antithesis of American values and as a political and existential threat of the highest order. In this discourse, Dewey is connected to Satan, communism and global conspiracy theories. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these beliefs for current educational and political philosophy and praxis.

INTRODUCTION The hermeneutics of reading Dewey have always been complex. Interpre- tations of Dewey are rooted in the social, political and educational contexts of the readers, and Dewey’s voluminous, complex writing is read and reinterpreted globally. It’s been argued that much of what has been said and done in Dewey’s name is tenuously related to Dewey’s actual writing and ideas, as readers have adapted their interpretations to the demands of their time, place and perspectives (Bruno-Jofre & Schriener, 2012) This paper presents a discourse analysis of contemporary far-right representations of John Dewey as found on English-language websites. The work expands upon an earlier discourse analysis (King, 2015) which was prompted by the unexpected questions about Dewey’s philosophy and socio-political beliefs posed by an undergraduate teacher education student. The student’s comments led to an earlier study’s research question—what would an undergraduate prospective teacher learn about Dewey from right-wing, neo- conservative websites? The earlier paper presented initial results from websites identiﬁed by searching for ‘John Dewey’ and the terms atheist/atheism, social

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 K. M. King Darwinism/Darwinism and communist/communism. This paper broadens the scope of the questions to ask, ‘How is John Dewey constructed in right- wing internet discourse?’ and ‘By what means has the far right come to construct Dewey in this way?’ In addressing the first question, the study expands the search terms associated with Dewey on right-wing websites, as specified in the next section of the article. In addressing the second question, a Foucauldian archeology of the terms, ideas and arguments is used, that comprise the contemporary far right’s Dewey, mapping elements of the internet discourse to earlier influential print works that clearly helped shape it. In so doing, this paper analyses the cultural and political contexts of the discourse and can be considered an archeological study in that it entails ‘analysing the relations between the discursive formations and the non- discursive areas . . . institutions, political events, economic practices, and resources’ (Jansen, 2008, p. 110). The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of these far-right perspectives for educational and political philosophy and praxis.

Terminology As in the preliminary study (King, 2015), I here define far-right using Ap- ple’s (2006) conceptions of neo-conservatism and ‘authoritarian populist religious’ conservatism. According to Apple, neoconservatives share ‘a vision of an Edenic past’ and want ‘a return to discipline and traditional knowledge’ (Apple, 2006, p. 9). Authoritarian populists are similarly nostal- gic, but also seek to reestablish ‘(their) God in all of our institutions’ (ibid.). I use the terms far-right to encompass both of these groups, particularly the authoritarian populist right. I do not see distinctions being made between them in the right-wing discourses I study, and certainly, as I note elsewhere, none of the authors whose work I surveyed distinguished between conservatism and populism or referred to themselves as ‘authoritarian populists’ (King, 2015). Sites that fit the definition of authoritarian populist would likely self-identify as conservative even though not all conservatives would identify with the beliefs promoted on these sites. The newer term, alt-right would arguably apply to many of these sites in the sense that it applies to ‘economic nationalists and “Western chauvinists” . . . overt white nationalists, committed fascists and proponents of a host of other ideologies that were thought to have died out in American politics not long after World War II’ (Schreckinger, 2017). Although many of the sites included in this analysis reflect the views of the alt-right I consider the term far-right more broadly inclusive and hence I limit my use of alt-right in this paper. I address the website contents as elements of far-right discourse in the sense that discourses are ‘ways of structuring areas of knowledge and practice’ that ‘do not just reflect or represent social entities and relations, [but] construct or constitute them’ (Fairclough, 1993). Foucault notes that a discursive formation is found,

‘Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Constructing John Dewey from the Right 3 concepts, or thematic choices, one can deﬁne a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations)’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 38).

Across these texts, I identify a number of common and significant rhetorical practices and claims constructing and reconstructing the figure of John Dewey and his work. The texts’ rhetorical practices encompass common text elements and narratives regarding Dewey that appear across multiple sources. As far-right conservatives grapple (or not) with Dewey’s ideas, they construct a version of the man and his global influence that is shared within the right-wing discourse of these sites, but may be unrecognisable to Dewey scholars and others familiar with his work and ideas. While it is difficult to determine the scope and influence of these critiques of Dewey in the United States, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency and his appointment of representatives of the extreme-right wing/alt-right to high-level posts in the US government, suggests that the authoritarian right now dominates US politics regardless of whether it reflects the views of a majority of US citizens.1

The Website Study For this paper, I identified websites based on a snowball sample of terms, an iterative process in which I started with a small number of search terms and then identified additional significant terms from the sites I found. I repeated the search process using the DEVONagent Pro search engine.2 The further search included the terms John Dewey and Alt-right, American values, atheist/atheism, conservative, Darwin/Darwinist/Darwinism, DeVos (Don- ald Trump’s pick for secretary of education), evil, Obama, Raphael Cruz (Evangelical preacher and the father of conservative Republican politician, Ted Cruz), Satan, Trotsky, Stalin, World Government, anti-American, Pat Robertson (televangelist, author and founder of Regent’s University), communist/communism and totalitarian. The result was a list of over 1,000 websites, consisting primarily of blogs and articles. This number included many sites that appeared more than once because they were associated with more than one of the search terms. Initially I reviewed each site, eliminating those that were not written from an overtly right-wing perspective. Next, I coded each text (article or blog post), resulting in a list of over 250 codes (i.e. key terms).3 In order to reduce the number of texts, I then identified those with 30 or more codes exemplified, which narrowed the number to 70 sites that reflected the highest numbers of the discourse’s key terms, ideas and arguments. In this sense, I consider them exemplars of the discourse. By focusing on the most concentrated discourse, I looked at the more extreme ‘authoritarian populist’ domain of the far-right discourse.4 After using this method of coding to select sites that best represented the far-right discourse on John Dewey, I referenced Fairclough’s (2003) list of analytical issues important to discourse, with particular attention to inter- textuality, assumptions, discourses and representations of social events to complete the analysis.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 4 K. M. King

CONSTRUCTION OF DEWEY FROM THE RIGHT The analysis indicates that through a process of what Eco (1979) called ‘aberrant decoding’, right wing sites depict a Dewey who actively con- spires toward ‘the goal of atheist tyranny’ through ‘the deliberate dumbing down tactics’ used in (US) public schools. Previous analysis as well as this current study found that in conservative discourse, Dewey is associated with many prominent, 20th century, totalitarian leaders and revolutionaries, including Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky, Marx and the Bolshevists. Dewey’s Democracy and Education appears as number ﬁve on the conservative pe- riodical Human Events’ list of the ‘10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries’ (The Human Events Group, 2005). There it joins The Com- munist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Quotations from Chairman Mao,Marx’s Das Kapital, The Kinsey Report and The Feminine Mystique. Philosophers and social scientists round out the list, with the work of Compte promoting positivism, Nietzsche challenging conventional morality, and Keynes advocating government intervention in the economy. This list gives a sense of the assumptions and values held by the right-wing authors. Christian idealism and morality, and free market economics, are promoted as the highest values and Dewey is interpreted as a threat. The epithets, descriptors and associations attributed to Dewey give a sense of how his work is situated within the discourse’s map of the intellectual and political world. Dewey is recognised as ‘the father of American education’, ‘the patron saint of public education’, and the ‘Godfather of public education’ (King, 2015). Within the discourse, he is considered variously a dupe and a devil, deceived and a deceiver. The table below shows the most common Dewey-related terms in the pieces analysed grouped by the number of sites that used the term. The appearance of these terms across numerous sites suggests their relative importance and demonstrates which words, concepts, and ideas are prioritised in the discourse.

Number of sites Codes (i.e. Dewey related words, concepts and ideas)

50 or more American values, Amoral, Atheist, Bankers, Common Core, Communism, Department of Education, Humanist, New World Order, Selﬁsm, Socialism, United Nations, War 30–49 Abortion, Collectivism, Columbia University, Crime, Evil, Humanist Manifesto, Indoctrinate, National Education Association, No absolutes, Psychology, Sex, Western culture 10–29 Anti-religion, Authoritarian, Brainwashing, Carnegie, Chaos China, Compulsory Education, Conformist, Corruption, Council on Foreign Relations, Darwinism, Deception, Decline, Dumbing down, Fabian, Feminism, Globalism, Government schools, Harvard, Hitler, Homeschool, Homosexuality, Illiteracy, Illuminati, Industrial order, Infected, Jew, Jewish conspiracy, Natural selection, Naturalism, No facts, Social justice, Totalitarian, UNESCO

How do these common terms structure similar narratives across the sites? As indicated by the number of its appearances across the sites, Dewey’s threat to presumed American values is one of the most common themes. The speciﬁc American values threatened by Dewey include Christianity,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Constructing John Dewey from the Right 5 capitalism and individualism. In particular, Dewey’s association with humanism, as indicated by his signing of the Humanist Manifesto (1933), his acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and his pragmatism are the foundation for claims that he was anti-Christian. His progressivism and travel to China and the Soviet Union are cited to prove his anti-capitalist, socialistic and collectivist views. The following passage from one of the websites typiﬁes the standard argument that Dewey challenges American values:

‘Progressive educator John Dewey, often referred to as the “Father of American Education”, argued more than a hundred years ago for a standardized curriculum in order to prevent one student from becoming superior to another, and envisioned a workforce ﬁlled with people of ‘politically and socially correct attitudes’ who would respond to orders without question. The traditional, American values of rugged individualism, self-reliance, and personal responsibility are to be rejected and children are to be educated to accept a collectivist world view’ (Farmer, 2014).

A reader familiar with Dewey’s work might wonder whether this writer has read any of it. The use of quotation marks with no source cited gives the impression that the writer is quoting Dewey. However, references to Dewey advocating a ‘standardized curriculum’ and a work force of people trained to ‘follow orders without question’ are sure indicators of a profound misrepresentation of Dewey’s positions. Such misrepresentation is common across many of these sites. As the analysis continues, I will examine how this came to be. The claim that Dewey is the ‘Father of American Education’ or the ‘Fa- ther’ or ‘Godfather’ of progressive education is a feature of many far-right depictions of Dewey. By claiming Dewey’s wide inﬂuence in American and/or progressive education, these authors are able to condemn public schools generally and lay a host of social ills at Dewey’s feet, suggesting that due to his inﬂuence, students are indoctrinated into an immoral system leading to societal entropy. In an article published in the digital independent news source, World One Daily, entitled ‘John Dewey’s Dunces’, Washington (2013) alleges that Dewey undermined Christian values in education by fanatically using public schools to promote socialism and atheism:

‘Dewey, with a fanatical zeal, promoted the singular idea of education atheism while permeating a Marxist socialist worldview into America’s public school system, leading to the deconstruction of Christian inﬂuence in politics, education, law, culture and society that exists to this day’ (Washington, 2013).

The students passing through this system are ‘dunces’ because Dewey has deliberately used the schools for propaganda rather than traditional transmission of knowledge. Expanding on this theme, the website

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 6 K. M. King EducateforChrist.org explicitly condemns Dewey and the public education system ostensibly created by him: ‘Dewey was an atheist, a humanist, and possibly more than anyone else laid the foundations of the current public school system that is destroying the foundations of our Christian heritage and the lives of millions of children. The state education system that indoctrinates millions of young minds and hearts every day into atheism, humanism, evolution, moral relevance, sexual immorality, and socialism—is the bad & rotten fruit of Mr. John Dewey. This anti-Christian and ungodly pagan indoctrination in the public schools is the root cause of the decline of Christianity and morality in America. If you think about it, the founder of today’s public schools, John Dewey, believed and taught and built state education on many lies, two of which are: there is no God and there is no soul’ (Educating Generations for Christ, 2012). Education scholars favourable to Dewey would likely dispute dubious claims of Dewey’s models of education being replicated to the extent feared by this writer. None would consider him the founder of public schooling in the US. While the question of Dewey’s influence on educational practice is ar- guable, some of the claims about Dewey’s beliefs are flatly false and supported by quotations attributed to Dewey which clearly did not orig- inate with him. One misattributed quote is: ‘There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then im- mutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent absolutes . . . Teaching children to read is a great perversion and a high literacy rate breeds destructive individualism . . . the child does not go to school to develop individual talents but rather are prepared as ‘units’ in an organic society . . . The change in the moral school atmosphere . . . are not mere accidents, they are the necessities of the larger social evolution John Dewey (signer of the Humanist Manifesto)’ (Christian Faith in America, 2007–2009). As indicated by the epithet describing Dewey as ‘signer of the Human- ist Manifesto’, the writer appears to be attributing the text cited to the Humanist Manifesto. However, it does not occur there. Dewey did not argue that teaching children to read was a perversion, nor did he advocate for low literacy rates to ensure an easily manipulated populace. Similarly, some version of the following misattributed quotation appears on 4 of the 70 websites examined: ‘Dewey proclaimed, “You cannot make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society”’ (Farmer, 2014). Neither ‘quotation’ accurately represents Dewey’s thoughts across his body of work. Rather, they seem to be cited from secondary sources interpreting Dewey’s ideas

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Constructing John Dewey from the Right 7 from a right-wing perspective, not from Dewey’s own work. This kind of second and third hand representation of Dewey’s ideas, whereby they are interpreted and reinterpreted across the right wing discourse until they bear marginal resemblance to what he wrote and advocated, is the rule rather than the exception across these sites.

New World Order Conspiracy Claims that Dewey used compulsory public schooling to both indoctrinate and ‘dumb down’ support further claims about the overall aims of public schooling, particularly in the US. Here, major educational organisations and entire fields of study are purported to be implicated in a grand conspiracy to take over the world. This conspiracy theory traces Dewey’s influence from the US’s National Education Association (NEA), a large and long- standing professional organisation for educators, to a totalitarian New World Order (NWO) by way of UNESCO. The website ThreeWorldWars.com, for example, presents a timeline of the development of the New World Order that cites 1933 as significant because it is the year that ‘The first Humanist Manifesto is published’ and ‘Co-author John Dewey, the noted philosopher and educator, calls for a synthesizing of all religions and “a socialized and cooperative economic order”’ (ThreeWorldWars.com, 2012). Other sites develop the connections between Dewey and the New World Order more explicitly. Dewey, working with associates including the NEA and secret councils, they claim, used public schools to prepare unsuspecting students for a New World Order (NWO): ‘It happened slowly—largely through stealth and deception. Today’s educational establishment, birthed over a century ago by John Dewey and his associates, learned early the tactics of social transformation: infiltration, propaganda, secret councils and continual multiplication through networks of influential new organizations . . . This malignant “octopus” grew until its tentacles reached around the world. Strength- ened by its countless affiliates—including tax-exempt foundations that shared its vision and funded its programs—NEA leaders and their international partners won power and influence in every strategic corner of the world. All along the way, they were molding minds that would fit their quest for a new world order’ (Kjos Ministries, n.d.). The same site references the United Nations and Agenda 21, ‘the radical framework for a totalitarian globalism under the banner of “Saving the Earth”’. The entire field of psychology is implicated also as Skinner and behaviourism are associated with Deweyan progressivism as tactics for global control. Similarly, curriculum standards are associated with the grand conspiracy, which involves every person being ‘monitored and assessed for their compliance with the ideals of our global managers’ (Kjos Ministries, n.d.). Concerns about government sponsored curriculum standards led me to code for Common Core. The Common Core is a set of national standards developed by governors of several US states and supported by federal policy. I have found Common Core appearing on 50 or more of the 70 sites

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 8 K. M. King identified. The Common Core is presented within far-right discourse as part of the totalitarian global conspiracy. The Common Core site and some of the others that reference the NWO connect the grand global conspiracy to the influence of ‘the Illuminati’, a term that also appears on the list of most frequent codes. In refer- encing a New World Order put into place with the help of Illuminati and/or other elites, right-wing discourse places Dewey’s work with a long- standing conspiracy theory described in the fictional work, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. The Protocols was a ‘religious’ tract published in 1905 by Russian writer, Sergius Nilus, who plagiarised a political pamphlet published in 1864, entitled ‘Dialogues in Hell’. The pamphlet’s author, Maurice Joly, had written a fictional dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu to critique Napoleon III. In the ‘Protocols’, Nilus replaced the part of Machiavelli with the ‘wise men of Zion’ and presented his narrative as ‘the supposed revelation of an anti-Christ and a secret plan for Jewish world domination’ (Boym, 1999, p. 101). Boym notes that The Protocols was widely read across Europe and the Middle East in the early 20th century, inflaming pre-existing anti-Semitism and inspiring pogroms against Jews in Russia. In the US version the conspiracy is a Judeo-Masonic plot, thus expanding the group of villains from a Jewish cabal to a more generalised global elite, sometimes referred to as ‘the Illuminati’ (Boym, 1999; King, 2015). The work has been a best-seller in right wing popular culture since 1935 (Boym, 1999). Finding the connection of Dewey to the New World Order conspiracy explains why I added the following codes to the analysis—bankers, brainwashing, Carnegie, Columbia University, Harvard, Jew, Illuminati, Industrial order, UNESCO, globalism and war. The Carnegies along with the Rockefellers are implicated in the NOW conspiracy, by way of funding for major universities, including Columbia University, where Dewey held a professorship and where he purportedly used his position to train generations of progressive teachers and administrators to take over the public school systems of the various US states. An article entitled ‘Groups Pro- moting a Globalist Anti-American Satanic Agenda’ makes this connection clear, noting that ‘the foundations (principally the Rockefeller and Carnegie) stimulated two-thirds of the total endowment funding of all institutions of higher learning in America during the first third of this 20th century’ (Wake Up America, n.d.) and that the money ‘went to promote John Dewey, Marx- ism, a One-World-Government agenda, and Socialism’ (ibid.). Another site uses similar logic to depict Dewey as working under the elite to destroy the US and Christianity: ‘In his books, Dewey wrote about how schools should be the instru- ment to construct an American socialist society . . . the Rockefellers (one-worlders) fund communistic and humanistic organizations. In 1946 they boasted, “the challenge of the future is to make this world ONE WORLD—a world truly free to engage in common and instruc- tive intellectual efforts that will serve the welfare of mankind every- where”. PURE COMMUNISM! PURE SOCIALISM!’ (Green, n.d.).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Constructing John Dewey from the Right 9 Against Public Schools The discourse also indicates growing resistance to public schools, often renamed ‘government’ schools in both the right-wing Dewey discourse and the current US political discourse: ‘Then in 1902, John D. Rockefeller created the General Education Board . . . This was a recipe for social control, and when the Rocke- feller Foundation began to bankroll John Dewey’s Progressive Educa- tion movement a couple of decades later, the use of government schools as laboratories of social engineering proceeded apace—delayed, perhaps, only by the second world war. We can see the results all around us—a significant percentage of public school graduates cannot read or write well enough to fill out a job application’ (Job, 2007). A further argument against public ‘government’ schools is their secular- ism, and so Christians have an urgent obligation to remove their children and place them in Christian private schools or to home school them: ‘The underlying philosophy of government schools has been hos- tile right from the start to fundamental American values of limited government and freedom of the individual from dominance by state and corporate interests. This hostility, as we noted, was invisible for a long time. The schools seemed to be doing a good job. Today it is out of the closet. Government schools, absent any instruction in decent values, are now dangerous. They are breeding grounds not just for politically correct indoctrination but for gang activity, drug abuse, and even sexual abuse of children by teachers . . . . The only solution— especially for Christian parents—is to get their children out’ (Job, 2007). The article implies that what is happening in ‘Government schools’ is a form of political correctness. This indoctrination by the left is evidenced by any instruction that questions the traditional patriarchal family (including feminism or gay rights); calls for cultural tolerance (which is anti-Western and anti-American); or notes the history of racial brutality and discrimina- tion in the history of the US. The author quotes another site (Moore, 2016) ‘which refers to public schools as ‘the satanic, State-controlled children’s “education” system’. In the next section of the article I discuss the textual influences on the writers of the pieces of the sites analysed.

TEXTUAL INFLUENCES Reading many of the right wing depictions of Dewey on these sites, one is left with the impression that few of the writers have read Dewey’s work. While some of the broad claims about Dewey are correct, for example, those regarding humanism and Dewey’s application of Darwin’s ideas to philosophy and the social sciences, most express little understanding of Dewey’s writing or the complexity of his thought. Nevertheless, a coherent picture of

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 10 K. M. King Dewey emerges across these sites and the discourse they represent. Many of the far-right websites analysed for this study drew from common sources in their construction of Dewey and his place in the world. Key among these are works by political scientists Paul Kengor and Henry T. Edmondson III, and evangelical preachers Rousas Rushdoony and Pat Robertson. These names were referenced across several sites and even when their names were not mentioned, language on many sites echoed their work. For example, Kengor’s book on US progressivism is titled, Dupes: How America’s Ad- versaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century (2010). As the title suggests, Kengor argues that Dewey was used by communists and socialists to undermine US institutions. In Kengor’s work, as on many of the sites which use similar terms and arguments, the ‘duping’ is understood to have happened on an earthly and a spiritual level with Satan duping the socialists and radicals who in turn dupe the people. Kengor, a frequent contributor to right-wing websites, also claims that progressives are duping gays into advocating for gay marriage in order to destroy the family (Kengor, 2013). Edmonson’s (2006) book on Dewey attributes to him responsibility for the ‘decline of American education’ that he purports has occurred since the 1950s. (Notably, in 17 US states, public schools were racially segregated by law during the 1950s). Dewey’s ideas, he writes, have led to ‘the dete- rioration, confusion, and disarray we see all around us’ (Edmonson, 2006, p. xiv). The frequent references to decline, dumbing down, and the lack of standards, across the websites indicate that this concern is widespread in this discourse. Kengor and Edmundson’s works are relatively recent and present arguments familiar to many Dewey scholars. Less well known are the references to Dewey in the evangelicals’ texts. For this paper, I reviewed Rush- doony’s Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) and The Messianic Character of American Education (1963) and Pat Robertson’s Collected Works,inpar- ticular The New Millennium and The New World Order. According to sociologist, James Aho, (2012) Rushdoony originated a form of Christian Dominionism that promoted the belief that Christians are ‘commanded by God to “reconstruct” America on the basis of biblical teachings’ (p. 545). Dominionists believe that ‘humankind is on the threshold of a ﬁnal battle between a “man-centered”, “piecemeal”, “pluralistic”, “secular/relativist” perspective (with roots in Enlightenment philosophy) and a “God-centered”, “totalistic”, “Christian worldview” (Aho, 2012, p. 546). Aho notes that public schools are a ‘special target of hostility for Dominionists’ because they promote Darwinism, sex education, and “tolerance” of human difference, a presumed “buzzword” for homosexual advocacy’ (Aho, 2012, p. 550). An initial scan of the two Rushdoony books makes apparent his connection to the right-wing discourse on Dewey. Numerous terms from the list above, as well as from the list of less frequently used codes, appear across his writing and describe themes in his work. Rushdoony’s work explicitly and extensively discusses Dewey with respect to many of the key terms, ideas and arguments found across the right-wing websites. These include epistemological concerns related to Dewey’s philosophy, including pragmatism, experimentalism and instrumentalism (Rushdoony, 1961, p. xxi);

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Constructing John Dewey from the Right 11 a distrust of psychology (with complete chapters on G. Stanley Hall and B.F. Skinner), and opposition to ‘statist’, ‘coercive’, ‘compulsory’, public schooling. Rushdoony’s argument against Dewey is primarily religious and epistemological. Because Dewey’s pragmatic worldview abandons absolutes, according to Rushdoony, it necessarily leads to breakdown into a destructive culture with no ideals and no direction for growth. For Rush- doony, the rise of the state in place of the family and the church equals ‘breakdown to hell’ (1961, p. 62). Rushdoony asserts a fundamental ethical disagreement around ideals, critiquing educational practice in which ‘ethics is emphasized, but not in any traditional sense. It is essentially altruism in the sense of serving humanity’ (Rushdoony, 1961, p. 60). For Rushdoony, ‘because meaning cannot exist apart from god, education too is haunted by the same spectre of emptiness’ (ibid., p. 63). ‘Starve the Beast’ is the phrase used by Dominionists to end government programmes by refusing to fund them (Aho, 2012). Reading the metaphor with respect to the broader discourse, ‘starving the Beast’, with Beast capi- talised as a proper noun, conjures a fight with the devil. Although Rushdoony expresses concerns about ideologies and organisations that would stand in the way of Christian control of US culture and the world, he does not connect the forces that would prevent Christian dominion to a worldwide conspiracy of elite ‘Illuminati’ in competition for world domination. However, picking up on Rushdoony’s Dominionism, televangelist Pat Robertson makes that connection. The association of Dewey with the New World Order traces to Pat Robertson’s works from the late 20th century, specifically, The New Millennium (1990), The New World Order (1991). As does Rushdoony, Robertson advocates for the return of authority to the patriarchal family and the church, for a very specific version of Christian dominion and he constructs Dewey as a ‘false prophet’ of humanism, ‘twisting and shaping the values and behaviors of American scholars and teachers . . . dismantling America’s inherited value system and its ethical foundations’ (Robertson, 1994, p. 424). For Robertson, universalism and globalism have replaced socialism and communism as the progressive agenda and ‘the specter of Apocalypse’ (ibid., p. 424). Robertson’s construction of Dewey’s influence parallels that of Rushdoony up to the point where Robertson introduces the Illuminati, of whom he writes:

‘Members of the Illuminati at the highest levels of the order were atheists and Satanists. To the public they professed a desire to make mankind ‘one good and happy family’ . . . by every ruse imaginable, the Illuminists were able to attract to their numbers the rich and powerful of Europe, very possibly including Europe’s most powerful bankers . . . Its inﬂuence is clearly alive and powerful today in the doctrines of both the one-world communists and the one-world captains of wealth’ (Robertson, 1994, p. 139).

Traces of Robertson’s discussion appear throughout the right-wing construction of Dewey on the internet. In fact, it appears that the discourse is

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 12 K. M. King more inﬂuenced by the work of Robertson, Rushdoony, Edmondson and Kengor than the work of Dewey himself.

CONCLUSION When I began this research, I was investigating the discourse represented across what seemed to be a small group of websites representing conspiracy theories that referenced John Dewey and his work. I came to see that contributors to right-wing internet discourse associated Dewey’s work and ideas with those of other thinkers and educational and social activists of diverse views to construct a vision of a long-term conspiracy of the left that culminated in Obamacare and failing public schools and worked toward eliminating freedom, religion and capitalism. After the November 2016 US elections, I believe that to consider this discourse to be marginal has become a luxury. In 1939, Dewey recognised the potential for ‘the democratic belief in free speech, free press and free assembly’ to expose democratic institutions to attack because, ‘ . . . representatives of totalitarian states, who are the first to deny such freedom when they are in power, shrewdly employ it in a democratic country to destroy the foundations of democracy’ (Dewey, 1939 [1989], p. 114). Dewey noted that ‘backed with the necessary financial means’, supporters of authoritarianism were capable of using the media for ‘carrying on a work of continuous sapping and mining’ (1939 [1989], p. 114). The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States has been attributed in part to the influence of the right-wing media and to Trump actively court- ing Apple’s ‘authoritarian populists’. Trump has engaged, encouraged and empowered this element of far-right-wing discourse.5 Further, Trump has appointed as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has no experience as an educator and is an advocate for shifting public education funding toward voucher programmes that would allow parents to send their children to the public, public charter or private school of their choice. DeVos is considered a ‘free-enterprise conservative’, who is ‘not likely to focus on curriculum issues like evolution and creationism’ (Bailey, 2017). Never- theless, the school choice platform she promotes allows her to effectively ‘starve the beast’ of public schools without overtly engaging in extreme right-wing discourse. Undoubtedly, the far right understands this. The construction of the right-wing’s John Dewey presents a number of challenges to philosophers, educators, even just citizens influenced by Dewey’s ideas. As I note in the earlier paper, it raises critical questions about the ethics of interpretation and presents specific challenges to pragmatic accounts of interpretation (King, 2015). If, as Rorty would say, authorial intention does not ‘restrict the scope of valid interpretations’, (Puolakka, 2008, p. 30), Dewey’s defenders are challenged to articulate an ethics of interpretation. Writing on a pragmatist theory of interpretation, and specifically on Rorty, Puolakka interestingly grounds such an ethic in Kant’s account of personhood and Rorty’s account of liberalism. If one’s work is

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Constructing John Dewey from the Right 13 an extension of one’s identity, Puolakka writes, it is ‘morally reprehensible to subject the artist’s work to our whimsies’ (ibid., p. 34). Articulating an ethic of interpretation for academics, however, is unlikely to affect the ways in which other discourse communities construct reality. One might draw hope from Uscinski and Parent’s research indicating that conspiracy theories are generally self-limiting, ‘weapons of the weak to recover from losses, improve cohesion, and coordinate resistance’ (Uscinski and Parent, 2014, p. 158). To the far-right, Dewey is representative of all of the ontological and epistemological challenges that scientific materialism poses to conservative Christian beliefs and all of the social and economic challenges that global capitalism poses to culture. With regard to public schools, conservatives experienced considerable losses of dominance throughout the 20th century: restriction of prayer, inclusion of the ideas of Darwin, racial integration, tolerance of homosexuality, to name a few. According to Uscinski and Parent’s research, conspiracy theories ultimately help check actual conspiracies and limit power in a democracy (p. 162). Dewey, who advocated for application of scientific modes of thought against propaganda and totalitarianism (see, for example, Dewey, 1989 [1939]), might approve of Uscinski and Parent’s consideration of conspiracy theories as epistemological and political experiments. In 1939, addressing the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, Dewey argued in Freedom and Culture that democracy must, by definition, demonstrate, ‘the efficacy of plural, partial, and experimental methods in securing and maintaining an ever-increasing release of the powers of human nature’ (Dewey, 1989 [1939], p. 133). From this perspective, one could see far-right conspiracy theories about Dewey as healthy and because false, inherently self-limiting. This requires substantial faith in ‘the democratic movement’ (ibid., p. 131). For Dewey, the democratic movement involved struggle (ibid., p.132). To maintain democracy, Dewey favoured what he called ‘the application of democratic methods, methods of consultation, persuasion, negotiation, communication, [and] cooperative intelligence’ (ibid., p. 133). He also argued for the necessity of educational methods that ‘develop skill in inquiry and in test of opinions’ (ibid., p.115). This is likely to be a greater challenge if students are educated in schools designed to limit inquiry, multiple viewpoints and pluralism (even more so than public schools do presently). Nevertheless, the Deweyan democratic method of addressing authoritarianism is engagement and education. Applying this to the present concerns means progressive educators must redouble efforts to create educational models that encourage testing of opinions and critical analysis of arguments presented as fact. Further, it means engaging in dialogue on the issues addressed by Dewey, challenging interpretations and misrepresentations of his work that are not based on careful readings of the work itself.

Correspondence: Kelley M. King, Department of Teacher Education, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #31127, Denton, Texas, 76203-5017, USA. Email: [email protected]

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 14 K. M. King

NOTES

1. As I will argue at the end of this paper, the appointment of Betsy DeVos as US Secretary of Education is likely to bring US educational policy in line with the views of the far-right as depicted here. 2. The DEVONagent Pro search engine offers a more thorough web search than common tools such as Google. 3. This involved reading one piece at a time, creating codes based on key terms in the piece, then searching for and tagging those key terms across all of the pieces. 4. Thus, although I have expanded the list of search terms, my sample here was in some ways a narrower segment of the right-wing discourse than that in the earlier paper. 5. Trump has chosen as his National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, a man who has retweeted accusations that the Clintons were part of a child sex abuse ring as well as ‘a baseless claim that the UN was attempting to create a one world church that prohibited Christianity’ (Kazynski, 2016). Steve Bannon, of the alt-right media outlet Breitbart News currently serves as his Chief Strategist.

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Aho, J. (2012) Christian Heroism and the Reconstruction of America, Critical Sociology, 39.4, pp. 545–560 Apple, M. (2006) Educating the Right Way. Markets, Standards, God and Inequality (New York, Routledge). Bailey, S. P. (2016) Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick, is a Billionaire with Deep Ties to the Christian Reformed Community, The Washington Post, 23 November. Available online at: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/alt-right-trump-washington-dc- power-milo-214629 (accessed 4 February 2017). Bruno-Jofre,´ R. and Schriewer, J. (2012) Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Re- fractions Through Time and Space, Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education (Florence, KY, Routledge). Boym, S. (1999) Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics. Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and the Protocols of Zion, Comparative Literature, 51.2, pp. 97–122. Christian Faith in America (2007–2009) Reshaping America’s Christian Values through Public Education (Christian Faith in America). Available online at: http://christianfaithinamerica.com/ culture-war/re-shaping-americas-christian-values-through-public-education/ (accessed 10 November 2016) Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, MacMillan). Dewey, J. (1939/1989) Freedom and Culture (New York, Prometheus). Eco, U. (1979) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press). Edmundson, H. (2006) John Dewey and the Decline of American Education. How the Patron Saint of Schools has Corrupted Teaching and Learning (Wilmington, DE, ISI Books). Educating Generations for Christ (2012) Comparison of Worldviews: Noah Webster vs. John Dewey, Educate for Christ, 31 July. Available online at: http://www.educateforchrist.org/ 2012/07/31/comparison-of-worldviews-noah-webster-vs-john-dewey/ (accessed 21 November, 2016) Fairclough, N. (1993) Discourse and Social Change (Malden, MA, Blackwell). Farmer, B. (2014) Common Core is Rotten to the Core, The New American, 9 June. Available online at: http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/18437-common-core-is-rotten- to-the-core (accessed 25 November 2016). Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York, Pantheon). Green, J. (n.d.) Communism and Humanism—Bedfellows! An online resource available at: http://www.aggressivechristianity.net/articles/commun.htm (accessed 21 November 2016). Jansen, I. (2008) Discourse Analysis and Foucault’s ‘Archeology of Knowledge’, International Journal of Caring Sciences, 1.3, pp. 107–111.

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Job (2007) Another Reason Why Christians Should Leave Public Schools, JesusChristIsLord, 19 November. Available online at: https://healtheland.wordpress.com/tag/john-dewey/ (accessed 21 November, 2016). Kengor, P. (2010) Dupes: How America’sAdversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century (Wilmington, DE, ISI Books). Kengor, P. (2013) Gay Americans: Dupes for Marx, WND, 24 October. Available online at: http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/gay-americans-dupes-for-marx/, (accessed 4 February 2017). Kaczynski, A. (2016) Michael Flynn Quietly Deletes Fake News Tweet about Hillary Clinton’s Involvement in Sex Crimes, CNN, 14 December. Available online at: http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/14/politics/kfile-flynn-deleted-tweets/index.html (accessed 4 February 2017). King, K. M. (2015) The Neo-conservatives’ John Dewey: An Analysis of Online Discourse, Journal of Philosophy and History of Education, 65.1, pp. 29–48. Kjos Ministries (n.d.) The Socialist Vision and Global Connections of the NEA, Chronol- ogy of the NEA (Enroute to Common Core). An online resource available at: http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/chronologies/nea.htm#dewey (accessed 4 February 2017) Moore, E.R. (2016) Ask Your Pastor: Why is the Beast of Socialism Eating our Children (Columbia, SC: Exodus Mandate). Available online at: http://exodusmandate.org/featured/ask-your-pastor- why-is-the-beast-of-socialism-eating-our-children. (accessed 4 February 2017). Puolakka, K. (2008) Literature, Ethics, and Richard Rorty’s Pragmatist Theory of Interpretation, Philosophia, 36, pp. 29–41. Robertson, P. (1994) The Collected Works of Pat Robertson: The New Millenium. The New World Order. The Secret Kingdom (Dallas, TX, Word, Inc.). Rushdoony, R. (1961) Intellectual Schizophrenia. Culture, Crisis and Education (Philadelphia, PA, The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company). Rushdoony, R. (1963) The Messianic Character of American Education (Vallecito, CA, Ross House Books). Schreckinger, B. (2017) The Alt-Right Comes to Washington, Politico, January/February. Avail- able online at: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/alt-right-trump-washington-dc- power-milo-214629 (Accessed 4 February, 2017). The Human Events Group (2005) Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Hu- man Events, 31 May. Available online at: http://humanevents.com/2005/05/31/ten-most-harmful- books-of-the-19th-and-20th-centuries/ (accessed 4 February 2017). ThreeWorldWars.com (2012) Significant Dates in the Creation of the New World Order, Three World Wars. An online resource available at: http://www.threeworldwars.com/nwo- timeline1.htm (accessed 21 November 2016). Uscinski, J. and Parent, J. (2014) American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Wake Up America (n.d.) Groups Promoting a Globalist Anti-American Satanic Agenda, The Forbid- den Knowledge. An online resource available at: http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/chronologies/ nea.htm#dewey (accessed 21 November 2016). Washington, E. (2013) John Dewey’s Dunces, WND, 25 January. Available online at: http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/john-deweys-dunces/ (accessed 21 November 2016)

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2018

‘To Be Is To Respond’: Realising a Dialogic Ontology For Deweyan Pragmatism

RUPERT HIGHAM

Dewey’s pragmatism rejected ‘truth’ as indicative of an underlying reality, instead ascribing it to valuable connections between aims and ends. Surprisingly, his argument mirrors Bishop Berkeley’s Idealism, summarised as ‘esse est percepi’ (to be is to be perceived), whose thinking is shown to be highly pragmatist—but who retained a foundationalist ontology by naming God as the guarantor of all things. I argue that while this position is unsustainable, pragmatism could nonetheless be strengthened through an ontological foundation. Koopman’s charges of foundationalist ‘givenism’ in Dewey’s work, and in his promotion of the scientiﬁc method, are not proven. However, Koopman’s ‘genealogical pragmatism’ may develop Deweyan educational theory by addressing dilemmas around curricular study. Koopman’s arguments also point towards a missing ontological piece in Dewey’s theory of knowledge. In the ﬁnal section of the article I offer a dialogic ontology as compatible with pragmatism. This dialogical ontology provides both an ethical foundation through interrelatedness, and a generative theory of meaning and experience, as emergent from the encounter with difference. In this framework, to be is to respond—or be responded to. I offer the metaphor of ‘realisation’ to capture the human experience implied by this ontological stance.

INTRODUCTION John Dewey’s Democracy and Education has profoundly shaped my thinking through its humane vision of the role of education in society, and the scope and power of its analysis. To mark the centenary of its publication I want to explore how Dewey’s radical alternative to traditional views of the processes of coming to know, and of education more broadly, might be enriched by a return to ontological questions that he studiously avoided. Just as pragmatism offered a different sort of epistemology, one without reference to either an objective or subjective reality, I would like to offer a different sort of ontology, one without metaphysics, which complements

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 R. Higham and strengthens Deweyan pragmatism—particularly his concepts of growth and communication. Seeking to escape the stranglehold of traditional representationalist ontology, in which an underlying material reality is the source and guarantor of the truth of our perceptions and beliefs, Dewey opts in this book for ontological agnosticism: he puts aside the vexed issue of the nature of reality to address the more urgent business of how we come to understand and act in the world intelligently and democratically. This remodelling of experience, interaction and meaning-making underpins more recent influential educational theories of knowledge and democratic participation, notably that of Biesta (2006). Koopman (2009) also seeks to build on Dewey in presenting a model of transitionalist pragmatism. He argues that Dewey’s writings sometimes lapse into an inadvertent foundationalism that is best remedied by hybridising ‘classicopragmatism’, which focuses on experience as the spur to meaningful understanding and action, with the linguistic ‘neopragmatism’ of Rorty, Sellars and Brandom, which focuses on language instead (Koopman, 2009). This allegation of a flaw in Dewey’s theory of inquiry has been strongly contested (Frega, 2009; Hildebrand and Pappas, 2010; Mar- golis, 2012). Rather than a flaw, then, I have been spurred by Koopman’s critique to argue there may be something missing in Dewey’s analysis that shows through at times in his writing—which an ontological underpinning can provide. In seeking that missing element, I will examine the parallels between Dewey’s pragmatism and that of Bishop George Berkeley, an English philosopher writing two centuries previously. Despite these parallels, Berke- ley maintains a clear ontological stance—that to be is to be perceived—and that the existence of all is guaranteed in the omnipercipient mind of God. While rejecting this argument, I will suggest that Berkeley was right (or perhaps, prescient) to insist on an ontological foundation for his understanding of thought and experience. I will then make the case for dialogic theory, as outlined by Wegerif (2008), as a more credible and powerful ontological foundation for pragmatism. Its central metaphor of ‘dialogic space’ implies that meanings emerge from the gaps that open up between different perspectives, and thus that difference itself gives rise to meaningful thought and action and offers a source of growth. Further, this theoretical perspective neatly dovetails with that of Biesta, whose neo-existentialist notion of ‘coming into presence’ (Biesta, 2001, p. 398) operationalises a dialogic ontology both as an ethical imperative and as a framework for understanding democratic agency. The key to both, I will argue, is the concept of response to difference, sometimes characterised as ‘the Other’. Together, I will argue, they can serve as the missing piece in Dewey’s picture. Finally, by the way of integrating dialogic ontology with pragmatist epistemology, I will offer two metaphors: first, by changing Berkeley’s ‘to be is to be perceived’ to ‘to be is to respond, and be responded to’; second, by suggesting that ‘realisation’, or more properly, ‘realising’, captures both the ontological basis and the human experience implied by this combined theoretical perspective. This theoretical hybrid, shared

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A Dialogic Ontology for Deweyan Pragmatism 3 implicitly or explicitly through pedagogy, can deepen people’s motivation to learn with, about and from each other, and from the world. Bringing these diverse lines of argument together in one article requires regrettable brevity in places; in particular, I rely on giving brief synopses of Friedman’s, Koopman’s and Wegerif’s arguments rather than the detailed exploration they deserve. I hope that responses to my broad claim here will help me to elaborate and strengthen my case in the future.

Berkeley’s Search for a Pragmatist Theory of Knowledge and Action Over 300 years ago, Bishop George Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1988 [1710]) provided a powerful critique of realist foundationalism that preﬁgures pragmatism in several important ways—so much so that Charles Peirce said of him, ‘Berkeley on the whole has more right to be considered the introducer of pragmatism into philosophy than any other one man’ (1903 letter to William James, in Friedman, 2003, p. 81). As Friedman points out, Berkeley’s deﬁnition of concepts, his understanding of habit as the consistent attribution of cause and effect, and his rejection of objects’ metaphysical status as unknowable and unhelpful, are all strongly pragmatic. While often labelled an empiricist, his enquiries were not underpinned by any experimentation—other than in critical thought. Above all, his desire to cut away unnecessary terminology and entities was pragmatic in spirit: ‘[Berkeley] advises: “Think with the learned and speak with the vulgar”—we may make use of any phrases we wish “so long as they excite in us proper sentiments, or dispositions to act in such as manner as is necessary for our well-being”’ (Friedman, 2003, p. 92). The phraseology here—‘proper sentiments’, ‘dispositions to act’—and the focus on the use of words in initiating actions and valuable outcomes rather than evoking abstract realms of existence, is eerily reminiscent of Dewey: Berkeley here is seeking to understand perceiving, thinking, feeling and action as interrelated activities that are, in Koopman’s phrase, ‘melioristic’ (2009, p. 9), or aimed at improvement. Berkeley’s riposte to common attempts to describe this process in terms of a connection between ‘perception’ and ‘reality’ is somewhat scornful: ‘It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But . . . what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? And what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?’ (Berkeley, 1988 [1710], p. 54). This elegant argument for the redundancy of an external material reality also proposes an empiricist theory of how we combine changing sensations and ideas to make objects meaningful and distinct in our minds. He had

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 4 R. Higham explored this more fully in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, arguing that since we cannot perceive the distance of an object directly, we infer it through a ‘habitual or customary connexion’ (Berkeley, 1948 [1709], p. 17) of relevant ideas. Thus he argues for a collapse of the dualism between mind and world so central to Dewey’s highly empirical pragmatism. Yet despite these remarkable parallels, Berkeley’s position was explicitly foundationalist. As with the contemporary philosophers of optics whose work he sought to challenge, Berkeley focused on vision as the basis for his conception of reality. To be is to be perceived—and thus the guarantor of the existence of all things not perceived at any given time by ‘spirits’ such as you and I, must be an omnipercipient God. This position has been much criticised—perhaps dismissively, by Samuel Johnson’s kicking of a stone and saying, ‘I refute it thus!’ (Patey, 1986, p. 139); perhaps fatally, by arguing that Berkeley’s God is as imperceptible and unfalsiﬁable as the material reality he seeks to undermine. Even Peirce, his strongest advocate, expressed his surprise and perplexity on this point: ‘ . . . that he should be capable of falling into so glaring a contradiction with his principle . . . the contradiction consists in his here making the existence of the thing consist, not in its being perceived, but in its being capable of being perceived. Now the difference between actuality and possibility is surely most important when it is existence that is in question’ (Peirce in Friedman, 2003, p. 88). Yet Peirce’s hypothetical theory of existence—‘countenancing the reality of “would-be’s”’ (Friedman, 2003, p. 89) is, I suggest, rather thin and circuitous. The concept of ‘the capacity to be perceived’ as the mark of the reality of things may help us to distinguish waking from dreaming, the proven from the unproven. Further, suggesting that something might be experienced in certain circumstances is useful in relation to Dewey’s notion of thinking, which he describes as relating to ‘the possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results’ (1966 [1916], p. 149, italics in original). Yet the idea of granting reality to the possible does little justice to the crucially immanent nature of embodied experience, which acts as the conﬁrmation or denial of our hypothetical thinking. Importantly, it also does little for us in providing a generative ontology, one that could account for how things become capable of being experienced. For Berkeley, the vision of God was the sustaining force behind our perceptions, but God was also the creative force through which the possibility of perception, and of perceivers, comes into being. While his theory cannot stand, I suggest his search for a generative, creative ontological force was important.

Dewey’s Ontological Agnosticism Berkeley’s failure to provide a secure ontological foundation to his pragmatist thinking, and Peirce’s unsatisfying attempt at an anti-foundational alternative, suggest why Dewey may have sought to avoid the attempt entirely. In Democracy and Education, rather than openly embracing or rejecting either God or an underlying material reality, Dewey takes an

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A Dialogic Ontology for Deweyan Pragmatism 5 agnostic stance by choosing to focus instead on what we can usefully know through a pragmatist lens:

‘Knowledge, then, is the ability to employ things with a purpose—we have had experience with them that enables us to predict how they will react. It is intimate, not abstract’ (Dewey, 1966 [1916], p. 185).

In line with Berkeley’s passion for eliminating redundancy, Dewey seeks to obviate the need for abstract ontological speculation by leaving no room for it in an account of our knowing through engagement with the world. Koopman, however, has argued that there are leaks in the seals of Dewey’s anti-foundationalism that require fixing by hybridising what he calls ‘classicopragmatism’ with the linguistic ‘neopragmatism’ of scholars such as Rorty and Brandom. In this section, I will briefly explore this argument and the counterarguments, and subsequently suggest that while Koopman’s case is not proven, it nonetheless helps to highlight what I argue is the missing element in Dewey’s thinking. I must stress that these arguments are between scholars with a deep knowledge of Dewey and other pragmatists that I do not claim the personal authority to rule on; I overview them principally to illustrate how these tensions have provoked my own distinctive response— which is to suggest how Deweyan pragmatism might be strengthened with an anti-foundationalist ontological stance. Koopman (2009) recognises that Dewey’s philosophy is essentially, and by explicit intention, anti-foundational. That said, he then points to a series of examples where he argues that Dewey’s use of language, and that of other ‘classicopragmatist’ philosophers, nonetheless could be interpreted as implying that experience itself acts as a foundation for knowledge. For example, he quotes from Dewey’s Experience and Nature where Dewey explains that primary experience ‘furnishes the first data of the reflection which constructs the secondary objects’ such that ‘test and verification of the latter is secured only by return to the things of crude or macroscopic experience’ (Koopman, 2009, pp. 79–80). For Koopman, this is an inadvertent slip into suggesting that ‘primary experience’ is of a different order that is presented to us wholesale as a given, rather than retail as mediated through our previous experiences, knowledge, understandings and aims—and that it thus assumes the prior existence of objects of perceptions or knowledge independent of the observer. He then defends Dewey from his own accusations on the grounds that he was unable to benefit from the warnings of subsequent philosophers who demonstrated the perniciousness of foundationalism in accounts of experience, particularly Sellars’ (1956) ‘myth of the given’. Such warnings, he suggests, would have prompted Dewey to have expressed himself more carefully. Hildebrand and Pappas’ (2010) response has two main strands. First, they argue that Koopman’s picking out of examples from Dewey’s work is partial and unrepresentative, that his claim that there are infrequent but consistent ambiguities in Dewey’s expression around experience simply doesn’t stand up in the face of the many clear statements of position Dewey gave, for example:

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 6 R. Higham ‘ . . . experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh na¨ıve empirical material’ (Dewey, 1958, p. 37). This quote, they argue, forestalls Koopman’s criticism by anticipating the possible but erroneous conclusion that an experience ‘seems to be fresh na¨ıve empirical material’, when in actuality it is already ‘overlaid and saturated’ with prior reflections and interpretations. Having made his position so clear, they argue, Dewey should not be presented with this charge on the basis of alleged moments of lack of clarity elsewhere. Second, Hildebrand and Pappas (2010) argue that Koopman’s attack on experience as foundational, derived from Sellars and Rorty, is misdirected; their critique was of the conception of primary experience found in Cartesian philosophy—precisely the sort of dualist foundationalism that Dewey (and Berkeley before him) were trying to disprove in the first place: ‘For the target of Sellars’ critique is a certain conception of knowledge—experience in the modern sense; but this is not ‘experience’ in Dewey’s dominant sense, namely, the best methodologi- cal starting point for a melioristic philosophy in a processual world’ (Hildebrand and Pappas, 2010). Dewey’s ‘experience’, they maintain, is foundational only in that he argues that it is where we start from, and where we must return, in seeking resolution of our thinking and actions; neither of these ideas imply an unmediated essence on which our experiences draw. The ultimate aim of Koopman’s critique is to establish the value of his proposed ‘third wave’ pragmatism by both drawing on the strengths of, and highlighting the weaknesses of, classicopragmatism and neopragmatism. He argues that the linguistic turn of neopragmatism gave rise to a new technical vocabulary that would have enabled Dewey to clarify his antifoundationalist position: ‘[Sellars and Rorty] fashioned a clever way of giving up the quest for the grounds of knowledge by favouring instead the project of specifying the field in which knowledge operates’ (Koopman, 2009, p. 95). Central to this argument is that our perceptions and experiences are recognised, understood and expressed through culturally distinctive linguistic concepts; thus uncovering the histories of their development and use is a sufficient description of coming to know and understand them, while avoiding any taint of foundationalism (ibid.). Based on their defences of Dewey summarised above, Hildebrand and Pappas attack this line of argument as ‘a solution in search of a problem’ (2010). They do nonetheless recognise the value of Koopman’s attempt to recognise and seek to resolve long-standing tensions between pragmatists, and to set out in new directions by bringing in insights from a broader range of philosophers. In particular,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A Dialogic Ontology for Deweyan Pragmatism 7 Koopman intertwines different pragmatic traditions with a wider field of philosophers and sociologists, such as Foucault and Bourdieu, to present what he calls ‘genealogical pragmatism’ (2009, p. 10). This combines the power of Foucault’s ‘problematisation’ of the present through a historical study of how ideas and objects came to be named, understood and used, with the power of Dewey’s philosophy for reconstructing the present to work towards desired futures. In this spirit of pragmatist rapprochement, I will start to explore the value of this position below by thinking through how a pragmatic genealogical approach might both strengthen Dewey’s central metaphor of growth, and add coherence to a pragmatist conception of curricular study. Alongside this, I want to suggest that this hybrid position still seeks, like Dewey, to circumscribe Berkeley’s ontological ‘quest’ rather than refuting its possibility or necessity. To set up this part of my case, I want to turn first to another quotation from Dewey, not highlighted by Koopman, which could be interpreted as foundationalist in a different sense. Dewey makes clear in Democracy and Education his strong commitment to science as a meliorative process of inquiry rather than as a fixed body of knowledge; however, there are passages in his later work that appear to contradict this:

‘The scientiﬁc method is the only authentic means at our command for getting at the signiﬁcance of our everyday experiences of the world in which we live’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 111).

This implies that there is a unitary scientific method—a contention rejected by historians of science since Kuhn (Chalmers, 1982). Also, it claims for that method a monopoly on realising ‘significance’, thus inadvertently instrumentalising us as tools for the development of science rather than vice versa. However, like Koopman, I do not wish to press charges because there are mitigating circumstances. Dewey was writing immediately before World War II at a time of rising nationalism, bellicosity and irrationality in global politics; as is made abundantly clear elsewhere across his work, he saw scientific inquiry as the principle vehicle for human progress, and as an intrinsically moral practice aimed at increasing fulfilment at the expense of suffering—not as a fixed system discovered by scientists over the ages. A lapse into foundationalist language here may have been no more than a form of emotive emphasis, in the way I might exhort others to focus on ‘the evidence’ and ‘the facts’ in our current climate of ‘post-truth’ politics: my use of those terms would be metaphorical rather than ontologically foundational, an appeal to focus on what we can rationally assert and discuss rather than divide ourselves through prejudice. Yet I suggest that this lapse was indicative of something missing in Dewey’s philosophy, the lack of which was exposed in this attempt to reach out to and convince others. My aim is thus to try to complete his anti-foundationalist jigsaw with an ontological piece. I will introduce this by examining his central metaphor of ‘growth’. Dewey states:

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 8 R. Higham ‘Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education’ (Dewey, 1966 [1916], p. 51). Dewey describes growth as a melioristic process and as an end-in-itself: in persons, in education, and in a democratic society. To say that a person, or a society, grows through educational activity is in keeping with this metaphor; it suggests a process of becoming more fully human unimpeded by arbitrarily imposed or inherited limitations. Koopman’s genealogical pragmatism might help to provide our metaphoric seedling with roots: a historical context that it can draw on in responding to the challenges of its present environment. From an educational perspective, this may be complementary to Dewey’s active notion of responsive, relevant, intelligent enquiry that sits awkwardly with the idea of a formal curriculum since, by its nature, it lacks responsiveness to the aims, dispositions and needs of individual students: ‘Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter’ (Dewey 1966 [1916], p. 109). Dewey argued that it is the teacher’s role to act as the bridge between students’ interests and the accumulated fund of wisdom in a society. I suggest, however, that a genealogical conception of formal disciplinary study would support this role by encouraging teachers and students together to develop critical understandings of how each discipline came to be, how it works, its contemporary uses, its possible future developments, and its syntheses with other disciplines—rather than imbibing it as gospel with an emphasis on accurate reproduction. It would be about the intelligent engagement with, and use of, disciplinary traditions in relation to existing problems in the world, emphasising their social and historical context, their development over time, and their transformability in the present and future. The study of disciplines would thus become an empowering means to other ends-in-view rather than an end in itself, while still respecting their value and integrity as repositories of specialised social wisdom. If we extend Dewey’s metaphor of ‘growth’ further still, however, we can see its limitations. The ‘indeterminacies’ (Burke, 1994, p. 257) we experience—the challenges to our settled habits that spur our plants to growth—are like sunlight: when they appear, they stimulate and provide the energy for the growing process. But at the risk of overburdening this seedling metaphor, it appears to lack one essential element: the soil in which it is rooted. And while the parallel process of active inquiry and genealogical inquiry proposed by Koopman, entwining two competing pragmatist traditions, is conceptually satisfying and educationally productive, it still gives no sense of the source of those enculturated responses outside a linguistic analysis of their histories and possibilities on the one hand, and the immediacy of our experiences on the other. We should look to go further than ‘specifying the ﬁeld in which knowledge operates’ (Koopman,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A Dialogic Ontology for Deweyan Pragmatism 9 2009, p. 95), and responding intelligently to the stimulation we receive; we should try to understand why we receive such stimulation, and thus seek the sources of these indeterminacies. I suggest that Dewey’s uncharacteristic foray into foundationalist language, which implied the prior existence of an underlying ‘scientiﬁc method’, was made due to a lack in his account of any such ontological soil; in seeking to communicate the urgent necessity of rational scientiﬁc thinking at a critical time he lacked something deeper and more resonant to link it to, an ethical imperative with inherent rather than instrumental value. In its absence, I suspect Dewey’s exhortation to his Kappa Delta Pi society audience that they develop an ‘intense emotional allegiance to the method’ (1938, p. 100) left the majority, for whom that sort of affect is reserved for real people and humane ideals, feeling cold. Thus Berkeley also had a point in arguing there must be an ontological foundation to account for the very possibility of experience as well as to understand its operation. Rather than his all-seeing God, however, I propose ‘dialogue across difference’ as a generative ontological principle, and as an ethical imperative, for melioristic pragmatism—which I will explore in the next section.

Dialogic Theory: Pragmatism’s Ontological Soil? I have argued that pragmatism, a relatively new philosophical tradition developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has roots in the early 18th century. Similarly, dialogic theory was developed principally by the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in the late 1910s and 1920s, thus making him a direct intellectual contemporary of Dewey. However, Bakhtin’s work was only ‘discovered’ in the West in the late 1970s, and subsequently interpreted for education and instrumentalised as pedagogy there by, for example, Robin Alexander as ‘dialogic teaching’ and by Neil Mercer as ‘exploratory talk’; this has since expanded rapidly in popularity as an educational approach (Howe and Abedin, 2013). More modestly, it has also been explored philosophically by Wegerif (2007), Kazepides (2010) and others. Like pragmatism, the roots of dialogic theory also extend back further—to Socrates, who wrote: ‘Thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind itself without a spoken sound’ (Plato, Sophist, 263e). This demonstrates an insight later clariﬁed by Vygotsky as a basis of sociocultural theory: that thought and language are learned ﬁrst through social interaction, and then internalised (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57). Bakhtin developed this by arguing that dialogue consists of ‘voices’—not just of people one talks to, but from books and other media, from history and folk culture across what he called ‘Great Time’ (Bakhtin, 2010, p. 170). Thus voices come from the outside in, they engage with other voices in our minds, and are transformed and re-voiced to others in a continuous chain of meaningful dialogue. I will try to hybridise pragmatism and dialogic theory in three steps: First, I will argue that Wegerif’s conception of ‘dialogic space’ offers a credible dialogic ontology that gives us a generative basis for human growth without evoking a metaphysical realm. Second, I will show how Bakhtin’s

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 10 R. Higham concept of ‘addressivity’ further distinguishes dialogic from realist ontolo- gies. Third, I will argue that the centrality of intersubjectivity to the concept of dialogic space affords an equally valuable ontological foundation for ethics as well. Wegerif defines ‘dialogic space’ as that which ‘opens up when two or more perspectives are held together in tension’ (2007, p. 148); although we can never share another’s perspective fully, the attempt to cross the gap invites new meanings to emerge from between positions. It is thus only inasmuch as we see something differently to others that we have any cause to discuss it, and doing so generates a dialogue around that shared object or idea. In building his case for a dialogic ontology around this metaphor, Wegerif draws on Derrida’s playfully self-referential substitution of ‘dif- ferance’` for ‘difference’´ —differently spelt, but phonetically identical—to illustrate that the meaning of language is not inherent in the identity of words or concepts (ibid., p. 22). The substitution of the ‘a’` into ‘difference’´ changes the meaning of the word, but not through any fixed meaning of the letter itself; rather, it is the difference between the ‘a’` and the ‘e’ in the context of the word that changes the meaning. It is only because the ‘a’` is in contrast, because it is ‘not-e’, that the new word has ‘an almost infinite but indefinite meaning’ (ibid., p. 23). The implication is that meanings neither have an ultimate origin, nor do they reach a conclusion; they occur within chains of dialogue without beginning or end, existing in the dialogic space that opens up between different perspectives. Drawing together the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Bakhtin, Wegerif then advances his ontological argument: that we understand and appropriate the world through the adoption of new perspectives on it. Ultimately, this is to say that the world (as we know it) comes into being through the act of making meanings—in relation not to a physical or metaphysical reality but to ‘original difference’ (ibid., p. 26). It is immanent, unbounded and generative difference, always already there, as the progenitor of dialogic spaces and their emergent meanings. It is not a foundational reality because it is never fixed. It is best understood as provoking the linking of prior meanings into new meanings rather than inhering in them, as a process not an object. As such, I argue, it entirely complements both inquiry-based and genealogical pragmatism as a source for their quests for new understandings and responses; it also provides the ontological soil for Dewey’s process of growth. Another plank of a realist ontology is that ‘truth’ is a function of the accurate and justified representation of a statement to an underlying reality. Bakhtin’s dialogic philosophy denied any such correlation, arguing instead that within a ‘polyphony’ it is possible for two or more contrasting voices to be true; the criterion of truth is thus not the representativeness of reality of any one statement, but the ‘addressivity’ of the shared dialogue to the enriching goal of engaging with and learning from difference (Robinson, 2011). Again, the parallels with Dewey’s pragmatism are clear: inasmuch as it is valuable to talk about ‘truth’ at all, it is as the quality of an activity in which exploration of problems leads to personal and collective growth. However, Bakhtin’s image of chains of dialogue made of interweaving strands, or voices, avoids having to make the outcome of the activity the

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A Dialogic Ontology for Deweyan Pragmatism 11 sole test of its truthfulness, or in Dewey’s terminology, its ‘intelligence’. Instead, the process itself is afforded intrinsic value through being engaged in the humane response to difference. I say ‘humane’ to recognise that, for Bakhtin, a monologue is an interchange in which one seeks to dismiss or overrule the value of other voices, thus making for a violent process in which the productive exchange of meanings is impeded. Dewey also recognised the inherently educative value of genuine communication, and the ethical imperative of this in a democracy (1966 [1916], p. 5); this is relevant to my ﬁnal step, which is to present a dialogic ontology as an ethical foundation. In Bakhtin’s work, and its development by Wegerif and others, we see dialogue both as a source of meaning and as a form of interrelation, in which we engage with and respond to others as if they really matter—whereby meaning itself emerges through the process of openly relating, with others at hand or at a distance, to shared ideas. This theme is developed by Biesta in his exploration of Levinas, who argues that we are not born thinking or knowing, but relating—and that the conscious ‘self’ is a construct that emerges slowly in childhood. The baby perceives no identity gap between self and mother until his or her perceptions accrue sufﬁcient evidence that different perspectives on the world exist (2006, p. 52). So even our identity as perceivers is emergent; each of us is ‘a-being-with-others’ (ibid.) whose ontological status is founded in dialogue, or the response to difference. This argument also removes the cornerstone of Cartesian foundationalism by making self-awareness secondary to the experience of relating to others— so we cannot aprioriascribe an underlying reality either to the perceiver or the object perceived. Biesta takes this further by drawing on Arendt, who argues that our uniqueness makes interaction with other beings inherently unpredictable: we are not ‘endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 8). This means that our human encounters, when responsive to the unique person and situation rather than judgemental or instrumental, are also founded in difference. Biesta thus calls for education to focus on participants’ ‘coming into presence’ (Biesta, 2001, p. 398) through intersubjective engagement. Again, this resonates strongly with Dewey’s position in Democracy and Education: ‘Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication . . . is educative’ (1966 [1916], p. 5). Furthermore, his theory of communication is fully compatible with the concept of dialogic space. He argues that one must reformulate one’s ideas in accordance with one’s judgement of another’s understanding: ‘seeing it as another would see it . . . [so] that he can appreciate its meaning’ (ibid., pp. 5–6). New meanings and understandings, then, emerge from the attempt to communicate with others; this process is inherently relational, ethical and educative. And again, a dialogic ontology particularly complements genealogical pragmatism, which emphasises the uniqueness of the situations in which we experience differences because of their temporal and cultural contingency. Bringing these three strands together, I argue that a dialogic ontology is fully compatible with pragmatism: it offers a valuable non-metaphysical foundation for pragmatism that provides an ever-generative source of meanings and problems, while protecting it from lapses into involuntary realism

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 12 R. Higham and supporting its central metaphor of growth. It broadens pragmatism’s criteria for value or truth to encompass authentic engagement with difference in itself, as well as the results of any such engagement. Finally, it roots the ethical nature of our interactions in something deeper than our accidental cultural history of meaning-making and rules: our fundamentally dialogic identities.

CONCLUSION: SOME NEW METAPHORS FOR A DIALOGIC PRAGMATISM I have argued both for Berkeley’s essential pragmatism, and for his pre- science in believing there to be a need for an ontological foundation for it. His foundation was ‘esse est percepi’. Yet having debunked the foundational realism of both the perceiver and the perceived, how else might this be formulated? My suggestion is ‘esse est respondere et respondi’: ‘to be is to respond, and be responded to’. The concept of response to difference as an ontological principle focuses on the interrelation between perceiver and perceived, and thus makes no metaphysical demands. That which exists does so only as a transitory process: a limitless chain of dialogue, the call and response of difference. Once again, this idea is hinted at near the start of Democracy and Education, when Dewey asks how ideas, unlike objects, can be transmitted:

‘ . . . by means of the action of the environment in calling out certain responses. . . . The things with which a man varies are his genuine environment. . . . In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being’ (p. 11, italics in original).

Dewey here argues that we are deﬁned by how we change—by what we respond to and how—and by our distinctive chains of interaction with the environments (including other people) which we shape and are shaped by in turn. It is only a small step from here to an ontology of difference that breathes generative life into this process. Finally, I offer the metaphor of ‘realisation’, or ‘realising’, to encapsulate both the process and experience of meaning-making as understood through a dialogic ontology. Its everyday double meaning of both making a connection in thought, and of bringing something into being, is useful to us here. Firstly, to say that both meaningful thoughts and actions are ‘realised’ through responding to difference helps to strengthen Dewey’s argument against mind/world dualism by suggesting no material difference between them. Secondly, the metaphor of ‘realisation’ seeks to capture something of our experience of agency when we respond powerfully to new ideas and situations—the sense that they allow new possibilities to come into being that may change us and our environment. Finally, ‘realisation’ seeks to capture the ever-emergent, generative nature of our encounter with difference, in contrast to the idea of a ﬁxed underlying reality: an immanent,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. A Dialogic Ontology for Deweyan Pragmatism 13 humane and creative principle to which I hope Dewey’s student audience, and perhaps the man himself, might have authentically pledged allegiance.1

Correspondence: Dr Rupert Higham, Lecturer in Educational Leadership, UCL Institute of Education, Programme Manager, Applied Educational Leadership and Management MA, London Centre for Leadership in Learn- ing, Room 653, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK. Email: [email protected]

NOTE

1. I am greatly indebted to David Hildebrand for his generous comments on a prior version.

REFERENCES

Arendt, H. (1989) The Human Condition (Chicago, IL/London, The University of Chicago Press). Bakhtin, M. M. (2010) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Texas: University of Texas Press). Berkeley, G. (1988 [1710]) A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (London, Penguin Classics). Berkeley, G. (1948 [1709]) An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, in: A. Luce and T. Jessop (eds.), The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (Vol. 1) (Edinburgh, Thomas Nelson and Sons). Biesta, G. (2006) Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers). Biesta, G. J. (2001) How Difficult Should Education Be? Educational Theory, 51.4, pp. 385–400. Burke, T. (1994) Dewey’s New Logic: A Reply to Russell (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). Chalmers, A. (1982) What is This Thing Called Science? (Milton Keynes, Open University Press). Cooper, J. M. and Hutchinson, D. S. (eds.) (1997) Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing Co.). Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education (New York, Macmillan). Dewey, J. (1958) Experience and Nature (Mineola, NY, 1958). Dewey, J. (1966 [1916]) Democracy and Education (New York, The Free Press). Frega, R. (2009) Review of Pragmatism and Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey and Rorty, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 1.1, pp. 1–7. Available online at: http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/11-koopman.pdf (accessed 20 November 2016). Friedman, L. (2003) Pragmatism: the Unformulated Method of Bishop Berkeley, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41.1, pp. 81–96. Hildebrand, D. L. and Pappas, G. (2010) Review of Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope, in James, Dewey, and Rorty, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Avail- able online at: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24466-pragmatism-as-transition-historicity-and-hope-in- james-dewey-and-rorty/ (accessed 20 November 2016). Howe, C. and Abedin, M. (2013) Classroom Dialogue: A Systematic Review Across Four Decades Of Research, Cambridge Journal of Education, 43.3, pp. 325–356. Kazepides, T. (2010) Education as Dialogue (Montreal, Quebec, McGill-Queen’s University Press). Koopman, C. (2009) Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York, Columbia University Press). Margolis, J. (2012) Review of Pragmatism as Transition; Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey and Rorty, by Colin Koopman. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 48.2, pp. 228–234. Patey, D. L. (1986) Johnson’s Refutation of Berkeley: Kicking the Stone Again, Journal of the His- tory of Ideas, 47.1, pp. 139–145. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2709600 (accessed 20 November 2016). Robinson, A. (2011) Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia, Ceasefire, 29 July. Avail- able online at: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/ (accessed 10 April 2018).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 14 R. Higham

Sellars, W. (1956) Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1.19, pp. 253–329. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Wegerif, R. (2007) Dialogic Education and Technology (New York: Springer). Wegerif, R. (2008) Dialogic or dDialectic? The Signiﬁcance of Ontological Assumptions in Research on Educational Dialogue, British Educational Research Journal, 34.3, pp. 347–361.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2018

Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist: Open-Mindedness and the Training of Thought in Democracy and Education

BEN KOTZEE

In epistemology today, the intellectual virtues are receiving renewed attention. Contemporary normative virtue epistemology suggests that a key task of philosophy is not only to study the nature of knowledge and thought, but to promote good thinking. While not regarded as a standard thinker in the tradition of virtue epistemology, Dewey thought like this too. In fact, study of the virtues that make for good thinking plays a key role in Dewey’s educational thought, most notably in Democracy and Education. In this paper, I reconstruct Dewey’s work on ‘the training of thought’ in Democracy and Education as a form of virtue epistemology. I give particular attention to Dewey’s thinking about the virtue of ‘open-mindedness’ and highlight the touchpoints and differences between Dewey’s conception of open-mindedness and contemporary accounts.

INTRODUCTION In recent years, interest in the nature and acquisition of the intellectual virtues has grown in the Philosophy of Education (MacAllister, 2012). The intellectual virtues are acquired intellectual character traits that govern how one is prone to think. For instance, we are used to describing thinkers as being intellectually honest, or intellectually dishonest, intellectually brave or cowardly, intellectually meticulous, or careless, or intellectually curious or dull. Such descriptions quite obviously contain evaluations of people as thinkers, but they also set standards for intellectual conduct in scientiﬁc, cultural and political life. We want people to demonstrate qualities like curiosity, honesty, courage, rigour, creativity (and a great many others) in how they think about the world. We also do not want them to demonstrate dishonesty, cowardice, sloppiness or drabness in their thinking. On the whole, good intellectual character is to be encouraged and bad intellectual character to be discouraged; concomitantly, few would disagree that part of the task of enlightened schools is to foster good intellectual character traits amongst its students. The effort to form students’ intellectual character in positive ways has long been seen as one of the central aims of education. Plato, for instance,

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 B. Kotzee proposes that there is but one intellectual virtue—wisdom—and that all the other virtues are subordinate to it (Republic, 428a–444e). For Plato, the task of education (at least, the education of philosophers) is to cultivate the wisdom that is needed to understand the true nature of the physical, moral and political world. Aristotle distinguished the intellectual from the moral virtues and held that there are five different forms of intellectual virtue: theoretical or scientific knowledge (episteme), craft knowledge (techne), practical wisdom (phronesis), intuition (nous), and philosophic wisdom (sofia). Aristotle held that while one can teach the intellectual virtues, strictly speaking the moral virtues cannot be taught—they can only be practiced. It follows that, for Aristotle, the main formative work of education is to shape children’s intellectual faculties; in fact, Aristotle held that the kind of education he had in mind would only work with older children who had already acquired the moral virtues (that is before entering his Lyceum). The intellectual virtues required for good thinking were not only prized by the ancients. Locke’s work on education (in Some Thoughts Concerning Education) and his work on epistemology (e.g. his Essay Concerning Hu- man Understanding) contain ample reference to the character traits needed for good thinking. Indeed, Roberts and Wood (2007, pp. 20–22) hold that Locke had a regulative view of the task of epistemology—the point of epistemology was to help reform people’s intellectual lives in accord with reason. Forming good habits of thinking was then also the task that Locke saw for education, writing that the teacher’s task is: ‘ . . . to fashion the Carriage, and form the Mind; to settle in his Pupil good Habits, and the Principles of Vertue and Wisdom; to give him by little and little a view of Mankind; and work him into a love and imitation of what is Excellent and Praise-worthy’ (Locke, 1989, p. 40). Like Locke, Dewey too thinks that philosophy and education should focus on improving thinking. From Locke, Dewey takes the idea that both our natural inclinations and our social environment often incline us to bad thinking. Referring specifically to Locke, Dewey holds that, ‘Education has accordingly, not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind—its rashness, pre- sumption, and preference of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence—but also, to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 25). Dewey holds that ‘the work of teaching must . . . transform natural tendencies into trained habits of thought’ (ibid., p. 26). In this paper, I am interested in Dewey’s conception of ‘the training of thought’—a conception that reaches a particular height in Democracy and Education (1916). While he does not use the term ‘intellectual virtue’ I hope to show that Dewey’s is indeed a virtue conception of good thinking. First, I sketch the development of Dewey’s thinking regarding ‘the training of thought’ through the two related works of How We Think and Democracy and Education.Next,I situate Dewey’s conception of good thinking within contemporary virtue

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist 3 epistemology and ask what the touchpoints are between Dewey’s work on the training of thought and more recent proposals regarding the development of intellectual character. In particular, I focus on one intellectual virtue that has attracted much attention in recent epistemology and that Dewey singles out by name: the virtue of open-mindedness. I explain how contemporary virtue epistemology views open-mindedness and ask what Dewey contributes to our understanding of this important intellectual virtue.

DEWEY ON THE ‘TRAINING OF THOUGHT’ While he is not a standard ﬁgure in virtue epistemology, Axtell (1996) makes a case for seeing Dewey as a virtue epistemologist. Axtell traces Dewey’s interest in the intellectual virtues back to his essay ‘The Virtues’ (1908). In that essay, Dewey treats the intellectual virtues alongside the moral virtues, but he gives the virtue of ‘wisdom’ a special place, writing:

‘ . . . the heart of a voluntary act is its intelligent or deliberate character. The individual’s intelligent concern for the good is implied in his sincerity, his faithfulness and his integrity. Of all the habits which constitute the character of an individual, the habit of judging moral situations is the most important, for this is the key to the direction and to the remaking of all other habits’ (Dewey, 1908, p. 375).

It is clear that, like Aristotle, Dewey saw the moral virtues as being directed or steered by the intellectual virtues—in this case, the virtue of wisdom. Two years later, in How We Think (1910), Dewey gives even more importance to such matters. How We Think connects Dewey’s work in psychology with education. It is not just a book about how we think, but how we should think (or why we think) and the book brings Dewey’s pragmatism full-square to education. For the pragmatist Dewey, the point of all thinking is to solve the practical problems associated with living. For Dewey the most fundamental human intellectual activity is ﬁnding out about the world so that we can act in it. Problem-solving does not merely constitute the aim or point of thinking; whether we realise it or not, all thought is a form of asking questions and answering them for an ultimately practical purpose. In How We Think, Dewey quite clearly identiﬁes the task of education as fostering the intellectual habits needed to engage in this kind of thinking as problem-solving. He holds that it is not the ‘business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach every possible item of information’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 28), but to:

‘ . . . cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves’ (ibid.).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 4 B. Kotzee In this passage, it is clear that Dewey not only has in mind thinking that is ‘individual’ or ‘creative’ (Dewey is often associated with individualism and creativity), but evidence-based thinking—as he puts it, having a preference for ‘conclusions that are properly grounded’. Furthermore, Dewey holds that this kind of evidence-based thinking is precious and hard to acquire. He writes:

‘No matter how much an individual knows as a matter of hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is not intellectually educated . . . And since these habits are not a gift of nature (no matter how strong the aptitude for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual circumstances of the natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition, the main ofﬁce of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The formation of these habits is the Training of Mind’ (ibid.).

In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey takes up the issue of the training of thought again. Rather than the psychology of thinking, in Democ- racy and Education, Dewey’s focus is on the role of thinking in society. Brieﬂy put, in Democracy and Education the training of thought is important, because it enables children to take part in democracy (which for Dewey is more than just a political system—see below). Despite the more political and social focus in Democracy and Education, there remains an essential connection with the earlier book, as Dewey reformulates many of his arguments from How We Think in Democracy and Education. To understand Dewey’s view regarding the connection between thinking and politics, one must understand Dewey’s view regarding democracy. For Dewey, democracy is not just a form of government, but a form of thinking and communicating with one another that people must adopt to live together as equal citizens in society. As Dewey writes:

‘A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 101).

The point is a familiar one to Dewey scholars. Democracy is not just a way by which people are governed, but is a way that people live together. Importantly, the democratic way of living together is one in which people communicate with one another about public affairs and in which decisions about public affairs are arrived at communicatively. That does not just mean that people talk about what is to be done, but that they try to persuade one another through argument. In Chapter 7 of Democracy and Education, Dewey sets out very neatly the tight relationship between this democratic form of life and education. A democratic society, Dewey holds, is not possible if society does not educate its young; moreover, the purpose of education for Dewey is to see to it that democracy as a form of thinking and acting together can continue from one generation to the next. As Dewey writes:

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist 5 ‘ . . . the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mu- tually interpenetrating, and where progress or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic community more interested than other communities . . . in deliberate and systematic education’ (ibid., p. 100).

Dewey’s point is that democracy does not come naturally. It is a form of living together that evolved over time and in order to become part of the kind of public deliberation and debate that characterises Deweyan democracy, each generation of children need to learn the ground rules of democracy afresh. Firstly, each generation of children need to learn how to take part in democratic discussion, that is peacefully, non-violently and in a turn- taking way. Moreover, they need to learn the principles by which these discussions are settled—the logic of rational persuasion—and they need to learn how to put these principles to use in democratic discussions. Lastly, children need to learn the thinking skills that are needed to reinvent or regenerate democracy as and when needed. This is, as Dewey puts it, the deeper reason why democracy needs education so much more than any other form of government; because in a democracy, the ideal is that any citizen should be in a good position to take part in open-ended democratic discussions about matters of public importance. Other, more hierarchical forms of government, demand that only the elite become versed in political debate, but democracy demands that every citizen be an educated citizen. I’ve explained why Dewey holds education to be so important to democracy. How must education carry on its task of preparing children for democratic citizenship? For Dewey, education’s task is to shape children’s thinking in such a way that they will become good democratic citizens and in Chapters 11–13 of Democracy and Education, Dewey explains what the democratic mode of thinking essentially consists in. Recall that in How We Think, Dewey stressed the role of thinking in problem-solving. In Democ- racy and Education, Chapter 13, Dewey starts from a related idea—that of having any experience at all.1 For Dewey, all thinking begins with experience. Dewey holds that experience is the combination of an active and passive element. On the active side of experience stands ‘trying’ that is attempting to accomplish or do something in the world; this is the analogue of Dewey’s focus on problem-solving in How We Think. On the passive side of experience stands ‘undergoing’, that is, feeling the consequences of what one has done. To experience anything, for Dewey, involves trying to do something and undergoing the consequences. For Dewey, experience gives rise to the most primitive form of thinking— trial and error. If one tries something out and experiences the same consequences sufﬁciently many times, it is possible to notice a relationship between trying to do the thing and experiencing the consequences. If one then makes a generalisation of the form ‘doing this kind of thing gets these kinds of results’, one is thinking. As Dewey puts it ‘thought . . . is the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and what happens in consequence’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 169). Dewey thinks that experience brought to consciousness like this is thought. He goes further, though, to distinguish

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 6 B. Kotzee between two kinds of thought arising out of experience. We can see these as two modes or phases of thought, one more primitive and one more sophisticated. Here is how Dewey describes the ‘trial and error’ mode of thinking: ‘We simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent procedure’ (ibid., pp. 169–170). Dewey paints the shortcomings of trial and error thinking as follows: ‘The action which rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected to . . . ’ (ibid.). Dewey sets out what is needed to overcome this problem: ‘But if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look to see whether the required conditions are there’ (ibid.). In short, Dewey thinks that trial and error thinking consists in merely noticing a correlation between two events—trying to do something in a particular way and success or failure. What is needed in addition to knowledge of such a correlation is knowledge of the underlying mechanisms that produce the effect. This more sophisticated form of thinking, Dewey calls ‘reflective thinking’. He describes it thus: ‘Thinking . . . is the intentional endeavour to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous. Their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going together is cancelled; a unified developing situation takes its place. The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does’ (ibid.). Why should we think and, more importantly, think reflectively? Dewey holds that we should do this to avoid two kinds of poor intellectual behaviour: (i) routine behaviour—that is doing things in the same way simply because one has always done it like that (or because someone else has done it like that), and (ii) capricious behaviour—that is acting at random. Reflective thinking represents an improvement on routine and capricious behaviour.2 Why is reflective thinking so important to democracy? It is because democracy is a form of living together in which we think about and reason with one another about what is the best thing to do or the best way to live. Democracy is a form of communal problem solving in which we overcome tradition or routine and caprice in what we do, by subjecting what we do and how we live to intelligent scrutiny. From this characterisation of democracy as a form of reflective, communal thinking, it follows that the essential

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist 7 education that democratic citizens should receive is a form of education in thinking. Dewey’s discussions of the intellectual attitudes conducive to good thinking reach a height Democracy and Education, Chapter 13 ‘The Nature of Method’. In this chapter, Dewey discusses the ‘habits of mind’ that are involved in good reflective thinking and how to promote them. He writes: ‘Some attitudes may be named . . . which are central in effective intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most important are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or whole- heartedness), and responsibility’ (1916, p. 204). In the passages following, Dewey describes each of these attitudes in turn. Directness. By ‘directness’, Dewey means confidence in thinking. Dewey defines directness by listing its opposites—self-consciousness, embarrass- ment and constraint. To be direct is to be unself-conscious, unembarrassed and free in one’s thinking. For Dewey, it means a confidence or straightforwardness in how one tackles intellectual problems and a focus on what one is investigating (not a focus on oneself). In fact, later in Democracy and Education, Dewey calls this virtue ‘straightforwardness’ rather than ‘directness’. Single-mindedness. By ‘singlemindedness’, Dewey means intellectual integrity, that is a ‘completeness of interest’ or a ‘unity of purpose’ in one’s thinking. ‘Single-mindedness is a rather odd word to choose, but Dewey means by it a full concern for what one is thinking about and not ‘divided interest’. Responsibility. Of ‘responsibility’, Dewey writes: ‘By responsibility as an element in intellectual attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them . . . ’ (ibid., p. 185). This is an interesting way to look at things. Dewey’s pragmatism meant that he always saw any phenomenon (human or natural) as a matter of its consequences. Here, Dewey holds that one only understands something if one knows what it is for or what it does. By responsibility, Dewey means thinking things through in terms of their consequences. Elsewhere, Dewey also calls this attitude ‘thoroughness’. For our purposes, the most important of the attitudes of good thinking that Dewey identifies is open-mindedness. Open-mindedness. By ‘open-mindedness’, Dewey means the opposite of partiality in one’s thinking. Open-mindedness is the overcoming of partiality and the active welcoming of ‘suggestions and relevant information from all sides’ (ibid., p. 206). He writes: ‘Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that’ (ibid.).

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 8 B. Kotzee Dewey’s identiﬁcation of open-mindedness as an important intellectual virtue would strike a chord with contemporary virtue epistemologists. To show the touchpoints between Dewey’s ideas regarding the ‘training of thought’ and contemporary virtue epistemology, we turn to the present.

OPEN-MINDEDNESS IN RECENT VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY In recent epistemology, there has been a flurry of interest in the intellectual virtues. For some time, epistemologists like Sosa (1980, 2007), Montmar- quet (1993), Zagzebski (1996) and Greco (2010) have held that it is not enough for epistemology to analyse the central concepts having to do with knowledge (like true belief, justification or warrant). Instead, epistemology should study what it is about individual thinkers as people that makes them good thinkers. Some, like Sosa (2007) and Zagzebski (1996) hold that the only way that epistemology will be able to solve some of its traditional problems—like how to respond to scepticism, or how to solve the Gettier problem3—is to turn from studying knowledge to studying knowers. Others, like Roberts and Wood (2007) hold that, quite apart from its value in solving problems in epistemology, studying intellectual character is important for its own sake. As Roberts and Wood hold, what most people are interested in is not how to understand knowledge but in knowing what to believe or think or how to become better thinkers. For Roberts and Wood, epistemology should become a normative or ‘regulative’ discipline that dispenses advice to the thinking public about good thinking. Roberts and Wood view a number of important intellectual virtues as particularly important to intellectual life—love of knowledge, intellectual courage, intellectual caution, humility, autonomy, intellectual generosity, practical wisdom and intellectual firmness (by which they mean the right kind of intellectual tenacity). Baehr (2011, p. 2) lists some of the same virtues as Roberts and Wood, but also includes inquisitiveness, attentiveness, thoroughness, fairmindedness, honesty, humility, rigour and open-mindedness. Amongst the intellectual virtues that philosophers of education cite as particularly important is open-mindedness; in fact, it would not be exag- gerating to say that open-mindedness is the most studied single intellectual virtue. William Hare’s work is closely associated with the study of and promotion of open-mindedness and he devotes two books (In Defence of Open-Mindedness, 1985, and Open-Mindedness and Education, 1979 to its study and promotion. In their survey of the intellectual virtues that revi- talised the idea that the intellectual virtues deserve wide-scale promotion through society, Roberts and Wood (2007) give what they call ‘openness’ a starring role. Furthermore, Baehr (2011) and Riggs (2010) both hold that open-mindedness is one of the first virtues typically mentioned on lists of the intellectual virtues that we are supposed to encourage in schools and universities. Baehr sketches three different conceptions of open-mindedness. Accord- ing to the ‘conflict model’, open-mindedness is a virtue that is especially needed to handle situations in which there is a conflict between one’s own settled view of a matter and evidence that conflicts with one’s settled view.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist 9 We admire people who are not threatened by views that clash with their own, so perhaps this is what open-mindedness amounts to, the:

‘ . . . willingness or ability to temporarily set aside one’s doxastic commitments about a particular matter in order to give a fair and impartial hearing to an opposing belief, argument, or body of evidence’ (Baehr, 2011, p. 143).

While initially attractive, Baehr points out that not all open-mindedness has to do with an openness to see the other point of view when one has already made up one’s mind about some matter. On the conflict-model of open-mindedness, open-mindedness is a virtue that comes into play when one has already made up one’s mind about something; it consists in the willingness to consider points of view other than one’s own. However, open-mindedness does not only come into play or is not only needed when one has already made one’s mind up about something. Open-mindedness is equally needed when one is still considering what view to form or struggling to know what to believe. Baehr mentions the example of a judge who approaches a new legal case with an open mind. The judge has heard no evidence and has not made up her mind either way about the case; yet we’ll call it a virtue if she considers both sides of the argument with an open mind. We can say the same about an open-minded detective or an open- minded scientist who comes, for the first time, to a new case or problem. Open-mindedness is the consideration of all evidence—not just one’s own settled view or what clashes with one’s settled view and is equally valuable in situations in which one has ‘made up one’s mind already’ and in cases when one is still uncertain what to believe. This leads us to a second possible view of open-mindedness that Baehr calls the ‘adjudication model’ of open-mindedness. According to this model, ‘open-mindedness is . . . a disposition to assess one or more sides of an intellectual dispute in a fair and impartial way’ (ibid., p. 152). This model seems an improvement on the ‘conflict model’ and deals specifically with the sort of case that Baehr mentions above. In the adjudication model, open- mindedness consists in treating the different sides in a dispute equally and fairly, or with the same amount of consideration. But even the adjudication model is not good enough. A third picture shows why. Sometimes, open-mindedness does not even involve having to adjudicate between two different possible positions that are in conflict with one another. In some situations in which we need to investigate matters and figure out the truth, there may not be two (or more) settled positions on the table between which we need to adjudicate fairly. Take Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. Fleming was not confronted with two options between which he could choose, like either ‘mould kills bacteria’ or ‘mould does not kill bacteria’; rather what we found ‘open-minded’ about him, was that he noticed that the bacteria on his mouldy slides had died and that he eventually made the connection (never made before) between mould and the death of bacteria. Perhaps keeping an open mind is not like willingness to hear the opposite view or like fair adjudication between views; perhaps it is more akin to the imaginative or

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 10 B. Kotzee creative thinking that Fleming exhibited in this case (when other scientists may have dismissed the dead bacteria on the mouldy slides as a ﬂuke or an accident). Based on this way of thinking, Baehr suggests a third view of the nature of open-mindedness—what he calls the ‘transcendence’ view. According to this third view, open-mindedness consists in one’s ability to and inclination to leave behind a default or privileged standpoint and transcend that to reach another cognitive standpoint. As Baehr puts it, open-mindedness is:

‘ . . . [t]he willingness to transcend a default cognitive standpoint in order to (i) take up, or (ii) seriously consider the merits of a distinct cognitive standpoint’ (ibid., p. 152).

Put very simply, on the transcendence view, open-mindedness is being in a constant state of readiness to change one’s mind. Yet another view of open-mindedness is found in Adler (2004) and Riggs (2010). According to what one may call a ‘fallibility’ view of open- mindedness, open-mindedness is not a stance that one takes towards any particular beliefs or set of beliefs, rather it is an attitude that one takes towards oneself as a believer. As Riggs puts it:

‘To be open-minded is to be aware of one’s fallibility as a believer, and to be willing to acknowledge the possibility that anytime one believes something, it is possible that one is wrong’ (Riggs, 2010, p. 180).

On Baehr’s ‘conflict model’ the essence of open-mindedness is to consider seriously viewpoints that conflict with one’s own. Adler and Riggs, one may say, present a different variant of this picture. It is not that, whenever one believes something specific, it must be that one should consider the opposite view too. On the Adler/Riggs view, open-mindedness is an attitude towards oneself as a knower; it is the attitude that one is fallible and could always be wrong.

DEWEY ON OPEN-MINDEDNESS To understand how Dewey thinks about open-mindedness, we must trace the way his thought developed from the writing of How We Think to the writing of Democracy and Education. In How We Think, Dewey ﬁrst mentions ‘open-mindedness’ in the context of spelling out the need for the ‘training of thought’. Dewey starts with Bacon and Locke’s observations regarding bad thinking or the causes of thought being led astray. Dewey particularly admires Locke’s analysis of the causes of poor thinking and summarises Locke’s view to the effect that bad thinking is primarily caused by:

(a) dogma, (b) closed minds, (c) prevalent passions, and (d) dependence on authority.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist 11 We therefore meet the notion of ‘open-mindedness’ for the first time via its opposite: the vice of closed-mindedness, which, in this context, Dewey equates with ‘fixed belief’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 25). Dewey first mentions open-mindedness in the context of calling for the training of thought in order to remedy the causes of bad thinking. The solution to bad thinking, Dewey holds, is a form of education that cultivates:

‘ . . . deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves’ (ibid., pp. 27–28).

Early in How We Think, Dewey seems to equate ‘open-mindedness’ to a form of thinking that is based on independent investigation, and is not driven by custom or dependent on others’ say-so. Dewey next asks how it is possible to train children in this form of thinking and here, he appeals to children’s natural capacities. Dewey holds that children’s natural ‘curiosity’ and ‘wonder’ must be transformed into a more complicated form of ‘intellectual curiosity’. In these passages, Dewey equates ‘open-mindedness’ with curiosity. Referring again to Bacon, he writes:

‘Bacon’s saying that we must become as little children in order to enter the kingdom of science is at once a reminder of the open-minded and ﬂexible wonder of childhood and of the ease with which this endowment is lost’ (ibid., p. 33).

Later in How We Think, Dewey makes more or less the same identiﬁ- cation, placing open-mindedness as a productive characteristic of thinking alongside the intellectual virtues of curiosity and humility (ibid., p. 177). He places open-mindedness as a form of curious wonder and childlike wonder or ‘mental play’. Dewey writes:

‘Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and ﬂexibility, are manifest in the free play of the mind upon a topic. To give the mind this free play is not to encourage toying with a subject, but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is open-mindedness, faith in the power of thought to preserve its own integrity without external supports and arbitrary restrictions’ (ibid., pp. 218–219).

In How We Think, we may conclude, Dewey has a view of open- mindedness that equates it with curiosity and with the inclination to explore the world in an evidence-based fashion driven by a sense of wonder. It is also clear that Dewey thinks that this attitude is naturally found in children and is dulled by some aspects of adult (social) life.

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 12 B. Kotzee In Democracy and Education Dewey again mentions open-mindedness for the first time in a negative context—the context of criticising some bad forms of thinking. Of bad habits of thinking, Dewey writes: ‘We speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their possessor always has them as resources when needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold upon things’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 57). Just as in How WeThink, he also goes on to identify open-mindedness with curiosity: ‘With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness (ibid., p. 59). Dewey’s main discussion of open-mindedness comes in Chapter 13 of Democracy and Education. In his point-by-point discussion of the important intellectual virtues, Dewey moves beyond the curiosity account. In these passages, Dewey returns to the pragmatic tenor of other parts of Democracy and Education and sketches open-mindedness as a form of thinking as problem solving. Recall that for Dewey, all thinking is, in some sense, a form of identifying problems and solving them. He holds that: ‘Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that. Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses’ (ibid., p. 206). In these passages, Dewey holds that ‘open-mindedness’ is essentially the kind of problem-solving attitude taken by those who engage practically in the world. For the one who is genuinely interested in solving problems, open-mindedness consists in an inventive welcoming of any evidence that can be helpful in solving the problem. As Dewey holds at the end of this passage, this problem-solving attitude not only consists in finding the means to satisfy a purpose one already has, but can also consists in finding ‘new purposes’ to pursue. To the four different accounts of open-mindedness discussed above, we can therefore add two inter-penetrating explanations of open-mindedness from Dewey. Open-mindedness consists in curiosity about the world that drives exploring the world out of an interest to solve problems. This ex- planation is reconcilable with Baehr’s third account of open-mindedness mentioned above—that open-mindedness is the willingness to transcend a privileged cognitive standpoint. Dewey also holds that one must guard against ‘privileged standpoints’: ‘Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results are the chief foes which the

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Dewey as Virtue Epistemologist 13 open-minded attitude meets in school’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 206), and goes on to mention: ‘The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils—restricting their vision to the one path the teacher’s mind happens to approve’ (ibid.). That Dewey thinks of open-mindedness as being able to overcome a ﬁxed viewpoint is further made plausible when he writes that intellectual growth is ‘impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien’ (ibid.). That open-mindedness is this active disposition to welcome alien points of view sits very neatly with Baehr’s account. However, Dewey’s solution still differs in emphasis from that of Baehr. For Dewey the solution to ‘intellectual blinders’ and ‘restricted vision’ is to be more like a child or to return to a childlike mode in one’s thinking. After all, Dewey writes: ‘Open- mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 206). If Baehr thinks that one must display the rather adult virtue of recognising that one has a certain privileged cognitive standpoint and working to overcome it, Dewey’s solution is being a little more like a child in one’s thinking—that is tapping into a natural sense of curiosity and wonder and a natural inclination to play. These are differences of emphasis, but go to the point of whether one’s motivation for being open-minded is something like a calculated and cultivated adult recognition that one must overcome one’s privileged cognitive standpoint or the retention or rediscovery of a natural curiosity within oneself that one has always had since childhood. While one may plausibly interpret Deweyan open-mindedness as a willingness to transcend previously held views, his view is not reconcilable with another account of open-mindedness we encountered above. This is the Adler/Riggs account according to which open-mindedness is essentially an attitude one takes to one’s own thinking—that it is the constant awareness and caution that one is fallible and may be wrong. Dewey does not think like this at all. Remember, for Dewey, open-mindedness is a virtue that is essentially sparked by one’s interest and involvement in the world; for Dewey, open-mindedness is trying to solve problems in the world in a ‘childlike’ fashion, by curious exploration and play. Indeed, in Chapters 4 and 16 of Democracy and Education, Dewey names another intellectual virtue, the virtue of ‘responsiveness’ that seems to capture this particularly well.4 In Chapter 4, Dewey links ‘sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind’ and in Chapter 16 he praises a certain ‘responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning’. This ‘alert eagerness for additional meaning’ is clearly an attitude one takes to the world, not an attitude of doubt in oneself. The impression that Dewey would not agree with the Adler/Riggs account is strengthened by his later stress on a virtue that we do not normally hear much talk of—‘directness’ (see above). Remember that Dewey thinks it is important in thinking to be direct—to be unselfconscious. Open-mindedness cannot be a form of self-doubt or self-consciousness (as Riggs and Adler think), because Dewey explicitly holds that:

C 2018 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 14 B. Kotzee ‘A self-conscious person is partly thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of his performances. Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of ideas. Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious of one’s attitude. The former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. It is a sign of a whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is dealing with. The latter is not of necessity abnormal. It is sometimes the easiest way of correcting a false method of approach, and of improving the effectiveness of the means one is employing—as golf players, piano players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give especial attention to their position and movements. But this need is occasional and temporary’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 204). In writing thus about ‘directness’, Dewey clearly expresses the view that a constant doubt in oneself as a thinker is not productive; such an attitude is only occasionally needed.

CONCLUSION In this paper, I have tried to show how Dewey’s thinking about the ‘training of thought’ as we ﬁnd it in How We Think and Democracy and Education foreshadows our contemporary interest in educating the intellectual virtues. In this, Dewey draws his inspiration from Locke, rather than from the ancients, but it is clear that Dewey’s educational work gives a very important place to the intellectual virtues. In particular, the intellectual virtue of ‘open- mindedness’ considered so important today, was of particular importance to Dewey too and explained the connection in his work between open- mindedness, curiosity and problem-solving.5

Correspondence: Ben Kotzee, School of Education, University of Birming- ham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1. Dewey’s ideas regarding thinking as a kind of ‘experience’ return as the major theme in Education and Experience (Dewey, 1938). 2. It is striking that Dewey has a very experimental, scientific view of reflection. This distinguishes his work from that of another exponent of reflective thinking, Donald Schon¨ (1984). Schon¨ sees reflection as an ineffable process that can really only be seen in action, while Dewey simply has an experimental view of reflection. Schon’s¨ work on reflection has led many educationalists to adopt an almost mystical view of reflection; I recommend Dewey’s version. 3. The problem to the effect that one can have justified true belief but still fail to have knowledge. See Gettier (1963). 4. I thank Rupert Higham. 5. My work was supported by the Spencer Foundation, for whom my thanks.

REFERENCES

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