John Dewey's philosophical framework and educational contributions

John Dewey (1859-1952) is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Although Dewey's contributions lie along several fronts, he is perhaps best known for the significant impact he made on the development of educational thinking. However, it is important to note that John Dewey was first and foremost a philosopher, whose work resulted in the "development of a philosophical framework for social thought that fused social science with psychology and the natural sciences in a modern form of logic and empirical philosophy." (Dykhuizen, cited Taylor, p. xiii) Thus, it is the objective of this paper to describe how Dewey's life and work in philosophy contributed to the field of education.

Early Childhood Influences

John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, the third of four sons born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich of Burlington, Vermont (Field, 2001). Dewey's childhood years in Vermont played a role in shaping his later thought and theories. for, the Vermonters of those days were educated as much by industrial and agricultural activities, as they were by the local school. This led Dewey to realize that the most important parts of his education, until he entered college, were obtained outside the school-room. Dewey then used this realization to focus, both in theory and practice, on occupational activities as the most effective approach to genuine learning and personal intellectual discipline (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 178).

Although the Dewey family belonged to the middle class, the young Dewey boys were made aware of the abysmal living conditions of the poor through their mother's philanthropic work among the underprivileged sections of society. The poverty that the young John Dewey witnessed near the industrial areas of Burlington probably affected him deeply, accounting for his lifelong concern over the resolution of social problems and ills. Dewey also benefited through the opportunities he had, as a child, for varied cultural contacts since Burlington's population was a culturally mixed one. Thus, it is generally believed that Dewey's association with boys and girls of cultural and income groups quite different from his own provided liberalizing influences (Dykhuizen, 1973, p. 3), and imbued the young Dewey with a sense of democracy that "became part of the marrow of his bones." (Berube, 2000, p. 35).

It is also speculated that Dewey was somewhat affected by his mother's over zealousness on religious matters. The adolescent Dewey, in particular, found his mother's constant questioning on whether he was "right with Jesus" distasteful (Berube, 2000, p. 34). These early experiences can be correlated to the religious views and philosophy of a more mature Dewey who rejected evangelical Christianity, first for absolute idealism with its emphasis on unity, and later for humanistic naturalism, which stressed on the continuity of man and nature (Dykhuizen, 1973, p. 22).

However, Dewey is also known to have acknowledged the role his mother played in encouraging the Dewey boys to break with family tradition and pursue a college education (Berube, 2000, p. 35). Considering the life-long impact that college education was to prove to have on Dewey, society is fortunate that Lucina Dewey was able to persuade her sons to go to college.

The Impact of College Education on Dewey's Thought and Works

John Dewey was fifteen when he graduated from high school. He entered the University of Vermont in the fall of 1875, where one course in the junior year caught his attention. This was a course in physiology, which was taught from a text of Thomas Huxley (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 178-179), the famous English evolutionist. The theory of evolution excited Dewey's imagination since it rejected the barrenness of static models of nature and suggested instead, the importance of focusing on the interaction between the human organism and the environment. In fact, Dewey was so strongly influenced by Darwinian theory that he later came to believe that a naturalistic approach should be taken to the theory of knowledge (Field, 2001).

Dewey's years at the University of Vermont also resulted in his close contact, both before and after graduation, with his philosophy professor, H.A.P. Torrey (Fields, 2001). Dewey's decision to pursue a career in philosophy, however, occurred several years after he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Vermont. for, Dewey's first decision was to try his hand as a high school teacher (Dykhuizen, 1973, p. 18).

As a high school teacher, Dewey continued to maintain the interest he had developed in philosophy. His attention was specifically drawn to metaphysical materialism, which led to his writing an article titled the Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism (Dykhuizen, 1973, p. 22). Dewey sent the article to W.T. Harris, then editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Harris's acceptance of the article is said to be a significant moment in Dewey's life and career since it apparently gave him the encouragement to further pursue his interest in philosophy (Field, 2001). but, ultimately it was Professor Torrey's active encouragement that decided Dewey in favor of philosophy as his life career. With this aim in mind, he enrolled as a graduate student at John Hopkins University (Dykhuizen, 1973, p. 26).

At John Hopkins University, the three men who staffed the philosophy department - Charles Sanders Pierce, George Sylvester Morris, and G. Stanley Hall - played a key role in influencing and shaping Dewey's intellectual formation. It is true that when Dewey was a student, he rejected Pierce's pragmatic approach to issues of philosophy opting instead for the idealism of Hegelianism, in which choice, he was deeply influenced by Morris. However, it is interesting to note that as Dewey developed his own independent thinking, he shed his Hegelianism and arrived at a pragmatic approach to philosophy quite similar to that of Pierce (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 181-182).

Dewey was also deeply influenced by Stanley Hall's lectures on psychological topics, which emphasized a close relationship between psychology and philosophy that was waiting to be worked out on the basis of the new experimental psychology (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 185). Thus, the pragmatism of Pierce, Morris's promotion of Hegelianism or the organic model of nature, and Hall's espousing of experimental psychology led to a confluence of viewpoints that propelled Dewey's early thought, besides serving to establish the general tenor of his ideas throughout his philosophical career (Field, 2001). The influence of these seemingly disparate approaches also explains Dewey's attempts to fuse the imperatives of science and nature (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 177).

Dewey's years at Hopkins produced other fruitful experiences and realizations as well. Chief among these was the discovery that the university did not provide for a philosophical interpretation of subjects such as law, political science, and history (Dykhuizen, 1973, p. 30). Disturbed by the absence of thorough university instruction in philosophy, Dewey opined in a long letter to Harris that universities should play a role in fostering an interest in social problems. The prime areas of need, he felt, were in the fields of ethics and social philosophy, which he labeled as "the philosophy of social relations generally - family, economic, and political." (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 184) This early concern of Dewey can be said to have laid the foundation for his philosophy of education, which he developed on a continuous basis right through his teaching career with the University of Michigan, Minnesota, Chicago and Columbia (Field, 2001).

Dewey's Contributions to Philosophy and Education

Dewey's views of social philosophy, psychology, logic, and ethics were focally seen as contributions to the solution of the problem of education, as Dewey defined it (Baker, 1995, p. 159). Therefore, it would be appropriate to first discuss some of the more salient points of Dewey's work in these areas before proceeding to any discussion on his philosophy of education.

The Theory of Truth

Following his theory of knowledge, Dewey maintained that an idea agrees with reality, and is therefore true, if and only if it is successfully employed in human action in pursuit of human goals and interests. This pragmatic theory of truth, as it came to be called, differed from traditional theories, which espoused that the true idea is one that corresponds with reality. Dewey rejected this notion on the grounds that such theories merely beg the question of what the "correspondence" of idea with reality is (Field, 2001). In fact, Dewey wrote that philosophy's chief function was "not to find out what difference ready-made formulae make, if true, but to arrive at and to clarify their meaning as programs of behavior for modifying the existent world." (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1058, p. 193).

Logical Theory

Dewey also applied the principles of instrumentalism to the traditional conceptions and formal apparatus of logical theory. Dewey achieved this by adopting what he called a process of intelligent inquiry to ascertain the functional value of the logical form through (a) managing factual evidence pertaining to the problematic situation that elicits inquiry, and (b) controlling the procedures involved in the conceptualized entertainment of hypothetical solutions. This approach led to the formulation of a new theory of propositions, where he replaced the accepted distinctions between universal, particular, and singular propositions based on syntactical meaning with a distinction between existential and ideational propositions (Field, 2001).

Metaphysics

In keeping with his philosophy of instrumentalism, Dewey consistently rejected any approach to ethics that proceeded from an a priori determination of morality. Instead, he insisted that ethics be considered a complex of social relationships whose meaning is to be determined in actual experience (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 233-234). Thus, Dewey proposed that ideals and values must be evaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or valuable instruments for social progress (Field, 2001).

Philosophy of Education

As described earlier, Dewey's interest in the role of education in fostering social progress was a driving force behind virtually all his work. Dewey believed that life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment. It followed, therefore, that continuity of life depended on the continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms. Further, human life entailed not just physiological survival but continuity of experience, which he defined as the re-creation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, and practices. Thus, Dewey concluded that education, in its broadest sense, is the principal means of assuring the social continuity of life, especially in an age where the gap between the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders has increased (Dewey & Edman, 1995, p. 90-92).

For Dewey, adaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms meant applying the principles of his instrumentalist philosophy to educational thinking. In other words, philosophy and psychology no longer had to do with speculations in the scholastic sense, but rather with the conflicts that were immanent in the human daily experience (Dewey, Harris, & Mccluskey, 1958, p. 195). These conflicts, according to Dewey, were best resolved through the creation of a learning environment and social condition that could facilitate flexible adaptation, which was crucial for human progress. Dewey believed that such a social condition was a democratic form of life, which should not be instituted merely by means of democratic governance but by the inculcation of democratic habits of co-operation. Such inculcation, Dewey advocated, should begin in the earliest years of a child's educational experience (Field, 2001).

Thus, for Dewey, it was vitally important that education move away from the teaching of mere dead fact to the development of skills and knowledge that students could integrate fully into their lives as citizens and human beings (Dewey & Edman, 1995, p. 98). Hence, Dewey conceptualized that the theory and practice of schooling must be based on a diagnosis of social conditions and interrelated theories of human behavior and experience (Baker, 1955, p. 158). This theory led Dewey to establish a Laboratory School at the University of Chicago where children learned much of their early physics, chemistry, and biology by investigating the natural processes that went into cooking breakfast (Wikipedia, 2004). Dewey's philosophy of education and efforts at reforming educational thinking and practices resulted in his being credited for his pioneering work in progressive education.

Conclusion

Dewey's work is more easily associated with informal education practice, and cannot be easily slotted into any one of the curriculum traditions that dominated North American and UK schooling traditions over the last century (Smith, 2001). However, as Kilpatrick observes:

wherever the community and the processes of society are matters of conscious study and concern, wherever education starts with present pupil or school or community problems and proceeds consciously to a wider and deeper social understanding of what is involved, wherever the aim is to start with present interests and deepen and extend these in their social implications, wherever the school is seen as a conscious agency to the intelligent improving of culture, wherever the aim is to extend democracy further...it seems fair to assert that in the degree they are done consciously...it is probable that the teachers so acting have directly or indirectly profited by what John Dewey has taught." (Dewey & Schilpp, 1939, p. 472).