Experience and Education is a short and sweet book by John Dewey (no, the library decimal system was created by Melvil Dewey, an unrelated man, although they lived basically at the same time) written towards the end of his career as a sort of “here’s how I see where we’re at” look at education at the time of its composition–1938. First and foremost, I absolutely loved it. I recommend it to anyone has ever been dissatisfied with school. It’s short (under 100 pages), and you don’t need any outside information to appreciate its essence. It’s one of those delightful “yes! SOMEBODY gets it” reads.
Dewey finds himself in the middle of two major competing systems of schooling: “traditional” and “progressive” education. Although both schools carry with them particularities from the time-period, Dewey shows these as essentially dichotomies between the old way of schooling (traditional) and the new way: an intentional revolt against the old ways, choosing to operate in an opposite fashion wherever applicable (progressive). Considering the diversity in any method of education, he’s essentially stereotyping, but it’s not done in a way that seems he’s building straw men to attack, but epitomizing the philosophical approaches to each in order to allow an exploration of the pros and cons of each.
Dewey prefaces this book with some of the following words: “This formulation of the business of philosophy of education does not mean that [contending parties] should attempt to bring about a compromise between opposed schools of thought, to find a via media, nor yet make an eclectic combination of points picked out hither and yon from all schools. It means the necessity of the introduction of a new order of conceptions leading to new modes of practice. It is for this reason it is difficult to develop a philosophy of education…”.
I think this is a great synopsis of what Dewey was aiming for in this book. That is, educational practices should be determined not by finding a middle ground between the two schools, nor by aimlessly picking and choosing from both, but by way of some sort of over-arching philosophical foundation. And taken as a whole, it’s where I disagree with him, to an extent. His “new order of conceptions” he dubs “experience”. It’s never given a formal definition–and thank God, really—in his book, instead being teased out over several chapters. His “experience” seems to have meaning ranging from what children experience in a classroom setting to adults using their own life experiences and imparting this wisdom in some distilled form. It always seems to exist as a kind of “begging the question”; it fills in the gaps; it’s a kind of MacGuffin for his arguments. That it is not explicitly defined means the reader is not caught up in having to ensure his definition holds up through a gauntlet of what is otherwise solid consideration. He is 100% correct when he says “it is difficult to develop a philosophy of education”; I think his one failure is trying to name one. Like I said, I absolutely loved this book. Whether Dewey has a cogent definition of experience, let alone a correct one, is irrelevant, I think, to the insight he offers, and more importantly, is irrelevant to the value in taking his arguments into serious consideration. Frankly, he could take out his thesis, leave in his terms of experience and his analyses of the different methods and types of education, and his book would still carry the same salience.
I think he felt compelled to have his “experience”-as-the-point-of-education thesis in for two reasons. The first is that I am beyond certain that in his career commenting on all sides of the education world he was constantly deluged by a string of sentiments to the effect of, “well, you know, it’s easy to criticize, but how ‘bout offering a solution instead of just bitching?” As if “stop doing something stupid and counter-productive” isn’t a tacit solution or otherwise worthwhile endeavor. It’s an egotistical defense to avoid having to confront criticism: if you can criticize the proposed solution, you can then decide that the original criticism lacks validity through faulty transitive logic. I am sympathetic to Dewey’s plight in this regard…. The second reason I think Dewey felt the need for this superfluous thesis was his desire to have a solution beyond dismantling bad ideas. I’m not terribly familiar with Dewey’s substantial corpus of work, but poking around, you can get a sense of the man by looking at the kinds of things he wrote. In addition to an education, he was also very well read in and an active author in the fields of psychology and philosophy. And in the time period he was working, the line between philosophy, psychology, and their related fields was much blurrier. In the same year that he published Experience and Education, for example, he also published Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, a book on logic and philosophy that came in the wake of Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. If I may be allowed the hubris to say so, in my experience, philosophers tend to have a compulsion to explain the essentially unexplainable in a very compact, particular way. “How shall we educate or children?” is such a question that can be answered a hundred ways, and normal people are often content with a smattering of answers. But not philosophers; philosophers seem to have to have an answer.
Perhaps that is a large digression for what I think makes a functionally small portion of the book. It really is a delightful read regardless. What Dewey does with mastery is critique, well, basically everyone. It’s supremely satisfying. On the one hand is the traditional school, with its teacher-centric system of artificial discipline and rote memorization of mostly useless facts. On the other is the progressive schooling, a student-centric system with hapless discipline and a failure to impart productive instruction. Obviously I’m stereotyping too. Dewey does well to latch on to specific aspects of each type of schooling and gives them all a fair analysis, pro and con. His opening sentences in chapter one sets the tone for the rest of the book: “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities”. The progressive schooling he discusses doesn’t exist as its own thing, it exists as opposition to traditional education. Without the former, the latter would have no raison d’être. Although traditional schools of the early 20th century do differ from modern “traditional” schools (according to author/historian Herbert Kliebard, a survey of 500 kids in 1913 Chicago yielded 413 with a preference to their factory sweatshop labor over school, and as much as I think school sucked, I know it wasn’t that bad), honestly, their essential nature seems unchanged based on the impression Dewey paints. I must have muttered “plus ça change…” every three pages. The boring drudgery and tedium, the caprice and arbitrariness with which seemingly everything is done, that abject apathy, obliviousness, and incompetence with which teachers assert their dominance…. Progressive schools may have vanished, excepting the occasional analogue on the fringes, but aside from an anachronism or two, its existence as a reflexive opposite to traditional education is still completely relevant in a critique of education. Just because schools are doing X means we need to abandon it in entirety, or try to do the opposite.
Most of the book is Dewey going back and forth between explaining how various aspects of education can be either positive or negative, depending on how they are applied (he favors the terms educative and non-educative). That is, there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong process in education, what matters is if the process is being used in a productive manner. He equates this productivity to experience–but as I said, I don’t think it’s necessary. Moreover, there are good and bad aspects of both traditional and progressive education. It’s not about traditional or progressive education being superior or inferior to one another, it’s about what works in either, and what doesn’t work in either. For someone who prefaced his book arguing that a via media isn’t the goal, he sure does a hell of a job pitching for one. Although to anticipate Dewey’s counter to my argument, a middle way for the sake of having a middle way is also stupid. What matters is that you know what the hell you’re doing. Understand the purpose of what you’re teaching, why, when, and how too. Without that meditation underlying your methods as an educator, your educating will end up sucking, even if it inadvertently hits upon some good ideas along the way.
The traditional versus progressive education arguments he uses are also applicable to the broader conservativism versus progressivism dilemma in society, and his approach of criticism puts that debate in perspective as well. Not everything traditional is good, but there’s also value in the wisdom of the past. Not everything new is good, but change is also necessary. It’s what we keep and what we change that matters, not so much that we preserve or change things per se.
The book is an engaging read, I think. Dewey’s clearly an erudite man, and his writing reflects that. But it’s not too bad. I’ve seen way worse. He’s not 8th-grade-level dumbed-down-for-the-masses easy, but compared to most philosophers and psychologists I’ve read who were active at the time? He’s immensely clear. The book is quite concise—although being in almost full agreement with everything he was saying made it feel as if he was being a tad redundant as it went on, but if you don’t read it all at once, it shouldn’t be conspicuous. He avoids the irritating loquaciousness one might expect of a philosopher, and he gets to his point quickly and avoids droning on and on.
But what ultimately makes this book worth reading, at least to me, is that it’s nice to see that somebody seems to get it. Somebody understands all the stupidity I’ve been surrounded with, and he lays it all out so elegantly. The book is replete with quotable, resonant, trenchant lines. The corollary is that it’s super depressing. He wrote this nearly 80 years ago, and it still seems like we’re in the exact same place. “Those who adhered to the established system needed merely a few fine-sounding words to justify existing practices”. It’s scary; it’s like he took my education class with me last month….