John Dewey - Democracy and Education - 11-25-2019

  [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/22/2025]

I could fill many more pages than I will from notes on John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916; The Free Press/MacMillan Company, 1966). He writes to my prejudices for a public education that fosters a democratic society. I am thinking of my own education, and what was going on with the politics of education at the time of my arrest. Reading has been distracted by thoughts. I also wonder if our current Donald J. Trump inspired crisis of democratic faith did not start a long time ago with our educational system. I wonder if African-American or Hispanic eyes might find other questions where I find a philosophy of education that would undermine racism and classism. I will put this forward: we need to remove any politician opposing a democratic education.

Before I write anything more - thanks to Willingboro Public Library (220 
Willingboro Parkway, Willingboro NJ) for sending into Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution their copy of Democracy and Education via the interlibrary loan program.

Major point: this book still needs reading by anyone having children, or any other interest in the educational system.

I write that having read only the first half of the book - so far.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive....

p. 3, "Education as a Necessity of Life"

And education is not limited to school:

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated....

 p. 5

Okay, there John Dewey banishes internet trolling from the realm of communicating, by setting a standard for communication.

Dewey does not write like Friedrich Nietzsche. He advocates for the democracy Nietzsche found dangerous. I find even Dewey's more technical passages written in a democratic vein - that is written so you read him because what he writes matters to your lives.

Now, moving forward:

...A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.

p. 87; Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education

***

 ...When social efficiency as measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential justification.

p. 122 ' Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims

 And there I will end this note on John Dewey. Yes, there is more I want to add under a different heading, for it is more general while also more personal. That gives me something for this afternoon, and a half hour of Sebald.

sch

[4/23/2025: We might have had more success in Iraq and Afghanistan (As well as Russia? As well as America?) if we had remembered (knew) these passages from Dewey. Democracy is more than merely voting. Why this thought did not occur to me almost 6 years ago, I have no explanation. Also coming into today's email was The Root Of The Problem from Sheila Kennedy, which had this striking passage:

Ultimately, the only counter-measure I can envision is better education. Better civic education, better instruction in logic, more instruction in how to determine the credibility of Internet reports. But that’s “ultimately.” I don’t know what we do today to counter the vast amounts of (excuse my language) horse-shit coming from MAGA and Trump and the Christian Nationalists. 

Let’s face it: the people who voted for Donald Trump do not occupy a fact-based reality. And thanks in large part to a vast Right-wing information ecosystem, there were enough of them to plunge America into the dark age we are experiencing.

 For my latest take on democracy and education, check out: Our Lack of Civic Education Will Be The Death of Us. It also has a link to a Sheila Kennedy post! Oh, dear, I am getting predictable! sch]