Dewey vs. Tyack & Cuban: Purposes of Public Education

Shared Views on the Origins and Grammar of Schooling

David Tyack and Larry Cuban share significant common ground with John Dewey regarding the nature of the traditional education system in the United States and its origins. Public education as it exists today is a product of 19th-century industrialization and urbanization, a process that created schools resembling factories — complete with timetables, rigid schedules, and teachers who acted like supervisors on a factory floor. Dewey abhorred this system and criticized it unmercifully for decades, both in its structure and in the type of information it imparted to students. In the history of American education, there has never been a more vocal or outspoken critic of the traditional system than Dewey, and none has been the subject of greater wrath from conservatives and traditionalists, even decades after his death. Tyack and Cuban were equally aware of the problems with traditional education, especially as the country prepared to enter the 21st century, though their vision of successful reform was always more incremental and gradualist than Dewey's. He was prepared to scrap the whole system and start over with a radically different blueprint — one that has almost never been implemented in public schools as he would have wished.

The public education system as it exists today was created by elite interests from the late 19th century through the 1950s. All of the aspects of public education that students and parents have come to regard as normal — age-grading, separation of subjects, standardized schedules, and one teacher per classroom — are part of a system created by policy elites that has changed little in the past hundred years. This "grammar of schooling" also demands strict discipline, traditional subjects, and rigid classroom control by teachers. Would-be reformers are not permitted to depart greatly from this model without incurring the opposition of the bureaucracy, business interests, teachers, and parents (Tyack and Cuban, p. 9). Dewey would have agreed that this grammar of schooling is a "dead ritual" that has changed very little over the last century, even if some trendy reforms have been added and absorbed into the same basic structure.

Tyack and Cuban harbored no illusions about the origins of this educational grammar. They understood that business leaders had the greatest impact on public education as the United States industrialized in the 19th century, and that those leaders dominated most school boards through the New Deal era and again after World War II. Capitalists and those they funded insisted that schools be run in a "business-like" manner — with schedules, timetables, and age-graded levels — primarily to prepare students for work in factories and offices. Public schools came to resemble the factories and offices of industrial capitalism, run like the assembly lines of Henry Ford according to the "scientific management" principles of Frederick Taylor (Tyack and Cuban, p. 85). This was the exact era in which John Dewey formulated his ideas on progressive education and mounted his strenuous opposition to the factory schools created by industrial interests and their allies.

Dewey would also have agreed with Tyack and Cuban that some progressive reformers had gone too far in the direction of faddishness and trendiness. He believed that some progressive schools had overcorrected in rejecting the traditional model. He did not maintain that all teacher guidance must be abandoned as "an invasion of individual freedom" (Dewey, p. 9). Not all experiences are "genuinely or equally educative," and some are positively "mis-educative," since certain experiences may land the individual "in a groove or rut; the effect again is to narrow the field of further experience" (Dewey, p. 13). Experiences may be too "disconnected from one another" to carry any overall meaning, or they may be enjoyable while doing nothing to cultivate self-control (Dewey, p. 14). Dewey denied that free activity was "an end in itself" and regarded this as a serious misapplication of his pedagogical principles (Dewey, p. 73). He did not advocate simply allowing children to do as they pleased without adult guidance, and insisted that "there is no intellectual growth without some reconstruction, some remaking, of impulses and desires in the form in which they first show themselves" (Dewey, p. 74).

Where Dewey and Tyack & Cuban Diverge on Reform

Tyack and Cuban considered John Dewey one of many utopian educational reformers in American history, even though he was probably the best known and most influential of them all. From the time of the American Revolution onward, reformers like Thomas Jefferson vested great hopes in the public education system that were almost certainly beyond its capacity to fulfill. In the 19th century, the Protestant-republican ideology of Horace Mann dominated the early public school systems, with particular emphasis on assimilating and "Americanizing" immigrants — which was also why many Catholic immigrants withdrew from the public school system in favor of schools that taught their own religion and values (Tyack and Cuban, p. 16). Progressives like Dewey, with their faith in science, evolution, and pragmatism, were also in continuity with this republican faith in the transformative power of public schools, now reformed and updated to meet the needs of the urban, industrial economy of the 20th century.

Dewey was driven by crusading, evangelical zeal, even though he had rejected traditional religion and its place in public education — much to the chagrin of Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists. His vision for the public school system, and for the larger society, was entirely secular and scientific. He wanted schools to prepare students to take their place as citizens in a modern, democratic society. He believed that traditional schools were turning out passive drones and robots on an assembly line rather than independent, critically thinking individuals, and that such a system was more suited for an authoritarian society than a democratic one.

Tyack and Cuban maintained that most reform efforts of the past 100 years had failed, but Dewey would have found their attitude too conservative, cynical, and pessimistic. His purpose was not simply to describe the system but to change it, and he believed that his model was far more compatible with democratic values. For progressives, traditional education was stultifying, with knowledge becoming an "imposition from above and outside" using subject matter and pedagogical methods that were "foreign to the existing capacities of the young" (Dewey, p. 4). Traditional education had many "brutal features," and students did not participate in shaping what was being taught — most of which was simply "static" knowledge from the past that did not prepare them for life in the modern world (Dewey, p. 4). It treated students like robots with no respect for their humanity or individual personalities, and often failed to emphasize causality even though cause-and-effect is one of the fundamental principles of modern science, and "neither the relation nor grasp of its meaning is foreign to the experience of even the young child" (Dewey, p. 104).

Dewey continually denounced traditional education as authoritarian, in which "passive and receptive students" received information from teachers and textbooks with no escape except through "irregular and perhaps disobedient" acts (Dewey, p. 72). Subject matter in progressive education should be drawn from life experience and then developed "into a fuller and richer and also more organized form," just as an infant learns to crawl before walking (Dewey, p. 86). He repeatedly insisted that the "cardinal precept" of progressive education must always be "that the beginning of instruction shall be made with the experience learners already have" (Dewey, p. 88).

Progressive education emphasized free activity as opposed to external control and coercion, and learning from experience rather than from texts, lectures, drills, and memorization. It placed more value on "acquaintance with a changing world" rather than the dead world of the past (Dewey, p. 6). All of the most important learning in life came through personal experience rather than information imparted by teachers into the minds of students (Dewey, p. 8). Traditional education was dull and boring, causing many students to lose interest in learning permanently and to be "rendered callous to ideas." After excessive drilling and memorization, they lost "the power of judgment and capacity to act intelligently in new situations." They came to associate all learning with "dull drudgery" and lost interest in reading anything except "flashy" and simplistic materials. In short, traditional education provided many "defective and wrong experiences" that were actually damaging to real learning (Dewey, p. 15).

Traditional education was so "bound up with the past as to give little help in dealing with the issues of the present and future." Knowledge about the past was not "the end of education" but only a means (Dewey, p. 11). Progressive education had to formulate experiences that were interesting and enjoyable while also promoting "desirable future experiences" (Dewey, p. 16). Traditional schools did not need to consider this because they operated only "from custom and established routine," but this did not mean that progressive schools must go to the opposite extreme of "plan-less improvisation" (Dewey, p. 18).

Similarities on the Politicization of Education

Tyack and Cuban go into far greater detail about the origins of the factory school than does Dewey, who was content to denounce it repeatedly and call for its overthrow. They are evolutionary by nature, while Dewey was a radical and a revolutionary. Industrialization had transformed the nature of American capitalism, which was no longer based on the sole proprietor, petty merchant, artisan, or small farmer, but on the giant corporation. In a very short time, "the capitalization of corporations valued at a million dollars or more jumped from $170 million in 1897 to $5 billion in 1900 and more than $20 billion in 1904" (Tyack and Cuban, p. 143). Instead of being trained as self-reliant, independent citizens of a basically rural, agrarian economy, most students in the 20th century could expect to end up as employees of giant corporations and bureaucracies.

Traditional schools were ill-equipped to supply the skilled and white-collar workers that the new economy required, much less the managers, engineers, technicians, and accountants. This was the era when the "grammar of education" as it exists today came into being, and it has resisted all attempts at major reform and overhaul, even as much of the Fordist assembly-line economy for which it was expressly designed has moved offshore. In this sense, the United States has been left with an education system created for a different era and an earlier type of social and economic order, but reformulating and updating it for the 21st century has proven extremely difficult. This is not to say that there have been no changes at all over the last 100 years — there have been, and some very significant ones.

Just as Dewey did, Tyack and Cuban agree that education reform has always been political in its origins and outcomes. Dewey believed that progressive education would improve American society, making it more open and tolerant, less racist, and more resistant to authoritarian and totalitarian influences from both the Left and the Right. Unusually for an intellectual in the 1920s and 1930s, he denounced both fascism and Communism as oppressive and totalitarian, and considered the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to be police states with many features in common. According to Dewey, social control always exists, and even the anarchist who intends to abolish all formal government will end up substituting other forms of social control. Even children playing schoolyard games have rules, for "without rules there is no game" (Dewey, p. 55). Rules are part of the game itself, and when they are changed, it becomes a different game entirely. Disputes only arise when someone violates the rules or when a decision by the umpire is regarded as unfair.

Progressive education, in Dewey's view, trained students to take their place as citizens of a democracy, with its ideal being the "creation of power of self-control" rather than control by coercion and external forces (Dewey, p. 75). He stated at the outset that educational philosophies have always been subject to political conflict "marked by the opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without" (Dewey, p. 1).

Dewey has always been a favorite target of conservatives and traditionalists in education who demand a "back-to-basics" approach, for there has never been a more outspoken critic of that kind of schooling. In traditional education, knowledge and information from the past are transmitted to students, including moral training and rules of conduct. Schools were very distinct organizations "sharply marked off from other social institutions" in which students were expected to maintain an attitude of "docility, receptivity, and obedience" (Dewey, p. 2). Their duty was to absorb all the knowledge of the past through lectures and rote memorization of texts, including the Bible, although Dewey did not mention this directly. The implication was always present in his writings, however, which is why evangelical Protestants and fundamentalists have been especially hostile toward him. Because of his view that morality was based on experience rather than on traditions passed down by organized religion and texts like the Bible, they have often attacked him as an amoral pragmatist — and worse. Battles between traditionalists and progressives in education date back to the early 1900s and continue to the present, with Dewey as a perennial target of conservative criticism.

Tyack and Cuban assert that all school reforms "are intrinsically political in origin" and that many groups have engaged in school politics over the last 100 years for a variety of reasons, including conflicts over race, religion, and ethnicity. At all times, however, the dominant group has been "policy elites" such as business interests that "had privileged access to the media and political officials" (Tyack and Cuban, p. 8).