Experience and Education

Dewey identifies what he considers to be the present challenge in education: tension between traditional and progressive educational methods. He introduces a theory of education that he believes can support meaningful pedagogical reform. He also warns readers of the danger of thinking about conflicting approaches to education as opposed in an absolute sense. This initial portion of the book sets the stage for a fuller discussion of Dewey’s preferred approach to teaching in subsequent chapters.

These initial chapters introduce Dewey’s distinctive expository writing style. His writing reads like a formal philosophical treatise, persuading readers of his points through well-developed, logically sequenced arguments. However, there is also a measure of informality in this writing, as Dewey uses the first-person point of view to state beliefs, addresses the reader in the second person, and sometimes invokes the plural first-person perspective, referring to himself and readers as “we.” He also intersperses persuasive prose with famous quotes, sometimes playfully changed to convey nuanced meanings and even humor. By the time he authored this book, Dewey was one of the top philosophers and education experts in the world. Not needing to prove his expertise, he relates to his audience informally while maintaining credibility. As a result, this book reads like Dewey is lecturing a crowd comprised of both education specialists and interested members of the public.

In the early 20th century, academic fields outside of the physical sciences began to use the scientific method of formulating and testing hypotheses through empirical observation. Dewey, part of the movement to bring empirical rigor to philosophy, argues for a more scientific, intelligently planned approach to education. He states that there has been tension in educational philosophy between the idea that education primarily involves controlling external conditions and the concept that what happens within the minds of specific learners should concern teachers. He contrasts two approaches to pedagogical theory, traditional and progressive education.

Traditional schools, focused on controlling external conditions of education and not concerned with internal learning processes, operate in a top-down manner. Students learn information and skills determined to be worthwhile in the past, usually through textbooks and teacher-centered lectures. Conformity, obedience, and docility are characteristics of students in this arrangement, with the teacher and student roles clearly separated. Such schools teach students subject material and methods set to adult standards, with minimal regard to how younger students might internally process the curriculum.

Dewey injects a bit of sardonic humor by changing the words to a famous line of Alfred Tennyson’s 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He says the role of students in traditional schools is “to do—and learn,” just as it was the fate of soldiers in the Crimean War “to do and die” (19). By manipulating this line, well-known among educators in Dewey’s day, he wryly compares students in traditional schools to soldiers who must obey unto death. Tennyson’s original poem reads:

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die,

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred (Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Poetry Foundation, 2017).

The progressive school movement, developed in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, foregrounds student experience in education and gives learners a higher degree of freedom in school settings. Moving away from traditional practices, Dewey argues, opens a new set of problems. Traditional schools, operating in long-accepted ways, do not need to justify practices with reference to developed educational theory. Progressive education, on the other hand, must ground its newer practices in educational theory or else operate in a haphazard manner.

Dewey warns that taking the opposition between traditional and progressive schools as absolute can lead educational theorists astray. He says that adherence to any “ism” is problematic because such positions define tenets in terms of the positions they oppose. Simply doing the opposite of traditional education is not enough. Just because traditional education emphasizes the authority of the teacher, it does not follow that progressive education should diminish that role. The progressive approach may in fact require more, not fewer, points of contact between students and adults.

In Dewey’s view, the challenge is that a progressive approach to education that emphasizes experience must proceed from a clear theory and intelligently designed practices. Developing and implementing a progressive theory of education is far more difficult than adhering to traditional methods. This is true even though progressive education is inherently simpler. Dewey compares this situation to the fact that for a time, the complicated geocentric cosmology of ancient Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy was easier to justify than the simpler heliocentric model forwarded by medieval astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus because religious authorities considered the newer idea heretical. This example, certainly known to educated people in Dewey’s day, neatly explains why progressive education is harder to justify even though it more closely corresponds to empirical reality.