ARTICLE GETTING IT RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING: IMAGINATION AND EDUCATION IN JOHN DEWEY AND KIERAN EGAN Davide Weible I. INTRODUCTION John Dewey’s theory of education, despite having become a reference point for the pedagogical sciences, has been subjected to much criticism. One of the most signifi- cant attacks came from Jerome Bruner (1962), who questioned Dewey’s principles as set forth in his “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897).1 Bruner chose that book for criticism because it foreshadowed much of the later writing on education by the American philosopher, and he assessed the five articles of faith contained therein against the background of the deep changes that had occurred in conceptions of society, so- cial institutions, and man. Then, paralleling Bruner, Kieran Egan (2002) stressed more recently the necessity to reconsider some of Dewey’s presuppositions from the viewpoint of contemporary advances in understanding, especially where new dis- coveries and theories in the developmental psychology of children are concerned.2 On the other hand, there have also been attempts to give new life to Dewey’s legacy. As for his greatest educational work, Democracy and Education (1916), Han- sen (2006) has edited a collection of essays that engage critically with its contents and provide examples of how one might make use of them today in research and practice.3 Having been the most translated of all Dewey’s works, and having become popular in such different contexts as educational research, humanities, social sci- ences, and many others, it is a classical text in I. Calvino’s sense, that is, something that has never finished saying what it has to say and will always provide insights and suggestions, as well as fostering debates and critiques. Without disputing Bruner’s and Egan’s approaches and denying the value of their remarks, the present research focuses on one aspect of Dewey’s teaching methodology—the role of imagination—that, though not fully developed into a coherent theory within his writings on education, and hence underestimated in the subsequent secondary literature, stands up to criticism and still proves to be viable. In the second section of the article I outline the contours of Dewey’s “problem of education,” as explicated in Democracy and Education, and explain how his learning by doing pedagogy originated as an appropriate solution, and, at the same time, is consistent with his general theory of language and meaning. In the third section I review the few but important passages where, within this classical work, the use of EDUCATION AND CULTURE 31 (2) (2015): 81-112 81 82 DAVIDE WEIBLE mental images by learners is recognized as necessary for the proper understand- ing of contents. Subsequent to this, works other than Democracy and Education are considered in order to better clarify the nature of imagination and its connec- tion with other aspects of child psychology operative in the educational setting. Further imaginative processes are described in section four so as to broaden, as much as possible, the set of elements to draw on after in the comparative analysis. In order to demonstrate the present-day validity of these ideas, in the fifth section I summarize the core of Egan’s criticism of Deweyan activism and progressiv- ism—indeed, one of the most effective negative assessments—and show how his methodological proposal is built on the attribution of a key function in imagina- tion, both in the cognitive development of children and in the teaching practices of educators. From this perspective, and quite paradoxically, the former’s theory turns out to be indirectly one of the best corroborations of the latter’s conclusions. Finally, the conclusion sums up briefly the achievements of the paper, suggests two connections that are worth considering from a historical-comparative viewpoint (they can possibly provide, as research prospects, further interdisciplinary support for Dewey’s claims), and dwells on some key theoretical points concerning the way the two pedagogues understand the ability to imagine. II. DEWEY’S “PROBLEM OF EDUCATION” AND ITS SOLUTION In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey maintains that the historical develop- ment of democracy as a kind of social life has led to a contradiction between what a society believes and what it actually does. On the one hand, modernity—the ex- perimental method in the sciences, the biological theory of evolution, and the in- dustrial reorganization—has seen the progressive achievement of the democratic values of multiple shared interests and broad communicative interaction. On the other hand, the way they are put into practice within the schooling system is con- tradictory and frustrates education itself, whose function is “discovering and de- veloping personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the activities of others” (Dewey 1916, 104). If the concept of democracy implies the constitution of a social system based upon such values as collaboration, solidarity, initiative, and common interests, education concerns instead the moral and intel- lectual development of citizens able to embody and perpetrate them. In a more fundamental sense, for Dewey (1916, 1–7), education is the process of the transmission of experience by means of communication through which a social group ensures the continuity of its existence. The absence of a genetic codification of social information and its distribution in an increasing set of cultural-artificial carri- ers, along with the extremely high degree of biological and psychological immaturity of human newborns, require the creation of a special environment for that transmis- sion to be accomplished. Hence, the educational setting consists of a relational sphere mediating direct contact with inhospitable surroundings as well as complex and E&C EDUCATION AND CULTURE GETTING IT RIGHT FROM THE BegINNING 83 extensive cultural contexts. The biological aspect of the gap—“[t]he young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition” (1916, 4)—calls for prolonged parental care, while the cultural dis- tance (in terms of the quantity and quality of knowledge) can be reduced in two ways. First, a solution is provided by informal and direct participation in working activi- ties, everyday practices, and rituals of the social group; this type of education does not pertain to “savage” societies exclusively, but rather it is the primary ground for the per- sistence of any kind of association, whatever the reason for its coming into existence. In Dewey’s words, it is “the education which every one gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist” (1916, 7), and encompasses such groups as “[a] clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin’s household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail . a church, a labor union, a business partnership, or a political party” (25) and so forth. Second, a formal, indirect, and deliberate type of education is required when- ever the complexity of the group widens to the extent that simple imitation can no longer be effective in transmitting knowledge. Its indirectness lies in the logical and spatial remoteness of adults’ actions, which presuppose such a large amount of prior knowledge that spontaneous immediacy becomes counterproductive. Its formality consists in the substitution of physical distance by symbolic reference and in the fact that experience is provided in a logical-hierarchical manner. Its intentionality, finally, is partly due to the written nature of the storage of information: “written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in acci- dental intercourse with others” (Dewey 1916, 22–23), and therefore they need to be communicated in a deliberately designed setting. With this kind of education, “in- tentional agencies—schools—and explicit material—studies—are devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special group of persons” (9). Because of the peculiar processes occurring inside it, school constitutes for Dewey a special environment endowed with three functions, with respect to the world of adults: (1) simplification of knowledge, (2) selection of features, and (3) multiplication of influences. However, since it implies a modelling context and not the original dimension of experience, “formal instruction . easily becomes remote and dead—abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation” (9). As a matter of fact, “one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between the in- formal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of education” (10). This mediation is geared toward the proper natural development of “thinking” and “learning,” which in turn meet the primary requirement of education by allowing the raising of democratic citizens. Faithful to his pragmatic and instrumental philos- ophy, and in direct reference to his account of experience, Dewey conceives thinking as “the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences” (1916, 177). More specifically, it includes “these steps,—the sense VOLUME 31 (2) 2015 84 DAVIDE WEIBLE of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental testing” (177). Proper thinking results