I picked up this slim treatise—the cover copy calls it “the great educational theorist’s most concise statement of his ideas about the needs, the problems, and the possibilities of education”—after encountering a wonderful quote in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.
What surprised me is that this this book, despite being published in 1938, manages to still feel urgent today.
I find myself in no position to credibly explore the legitimacy of Dewey’s proposals (assuming that they were implemented somewhere), or the impact that Dewey had (continues to have) on American education.
But what I can do is react to some of his observations, particularly as they relate to my own educational experience.
Either/Or
Dewey begins this book observing that people like to structure ideas within oppositional frameworks.
As Dewey puts it: “[Mankind] is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.” (The observation has weight beyond the discussed contrast between “traditional” and “progressive” educations, obviously.)
So we should seek compromise?
Well, not necessarily.
Dewey is skeptical of beliefs that are “right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise.”
If practices are unhinged from the theory, then the theory seems pretty useless.
The main problem with “progressive education,” according to Dewey, is that there’s little underpinning theory to the educational philosophy involved. The practices and beliefs of progressive education are reactionary to those of traditional education.
The result is little, if any, concordance of beliefs across the two camps.
Traditional education
My period of formal education ran from 1995, when I entered pre-Kindergarten, through 2013, when I graduated from college.
Dewey’s description of “traditional education,” written more than half a century prior, holds true:
The main purpose or objective is to prepare the young for future responsibilities and for success in life, by means of acquisition of the organized bodies of information and prepared forms of skill which comprehend the material of instruction.
Dewey observes this and then asks: Do we agree? Is that how we would philosophically define education?
Taylor Coe 