Craig A. Cunningham, Ph.D.
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Finding Useful John Dewey Resources on the Internet, Part
3 In the first two installments of this series, I explored some of the many internet resources devoted to the life and work of John Dewey. The first article looked at established, institutional websites, and the second looked at sites maintained by Dewey scholars and "fans." This third article looks specifically at websites maintained by Dewey critics. All three of these articles are available in "clickable" form on the author’s website, at http://craigcunningham.com/dewey. According to Google.com, the phrase "John Dewey" appears on more than 159,000 web pages. I’ve described some of the most useful of those pages in the previous two articles in this series. Many other pages only mention Dewey in passing (or as part of lists with William James, or Edward Thorndike, or Walter Lippman). Most of the substantive appearances of Dewey’s name on the Web contain praise for Dewey’s ideas, or at least recognition that he was an important figure in 20th century philosophy and public life. However, as one looks more carefully through the pages mentioning Dewey, one discovers that a substantial minority are not at all praiseworthy or even neutral. Rather, Dewey is repeatedly blamed for some of the worst ills of modern society. Having been struck by the consistency of this finger-pointing, I decided to spend some time looking at these critical pages, in the hopes of better understanding both the origins of and the sustained interest in large scale Dewey-bashing. What comes clear from this review is that Dewey’s ideas about education, ethics, and democracy--seemingly peaceful and benign to those of us with progressive tendencies in our values and communities--are on the front lines in an increasingly vituperative "culture war" between progressivism and the forces of reaction. According to what appears to be a consistent "party line" about Dewey, his ideas about education have resulted in a recent surge of juvenile violence, a marked reduction in subject-matter knowledge and basic skills among America’s children, a pernicious increase in state control of education and of thought, and an epidemic of dishonesty in business and public life. The criticism comes from at least two types of institutions which may--if their shared complaints are any indication--be allied just beneath the surface. These are conservative Christian educational organizations, usually affiliated with evangelical Christian churches located mostly in the nation’s South; and economic conservatives, represented by radically capitalistic voices such as those found in Capitalism Magazine and the so-called objectivists devoted to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The churches despise Dewey’s naturalism, tolerance, and humanism, while the capitalists fear his commitment to public institutions and economically-oppressed groups, and the objectivists his situational understanding of truth and goodness. All of these groups are suspicious of his socialist tendencies, of the ways that his educational philosophy have been interpreted in progressive schools and curriculum materials, and of the threat he poses to anyone holding an allegedly universal truth. Representative of the first group is the Faith Christian Ministries in Oliver Springs, Tennessee. Its website, at http://www.faithchristianmin.org, contains a number of articles about education written by the Director, Dr. Paul Cates. The articles elaborate a comprehensive philosophy of education devoted to using the Bible as a teaching manual for homeschooling and schooling in private, religious schools. The articles repeatedly blame the "atheistic, materialistic, educational concoction of John Dewey" for all that is ineffective and immoral about public schools. According to Cates and many other online critics, Dewey’s ideas were tried out in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s, but were eventually rejected because the experiment "developed a nation of juvenile delinquents." The reason is because Dewey opposes any form of discipline, whether from school, church, or home. "The promulgators of progressive education are opposed to discipline because they seem to be convinced that the only reason that their super-man has not yet evolved, is due to the restrictions imposed by every preceding generation on the succeeding one. And these restrictions were transmitted through the rules and regulations imposed by the school, the church, and the home. This goal appears to be their great dream. If they could eliminate the discipline imposed by these three agencies, nature would be free to continue its process of evolution." While the Soviets wisely gave up progressivism after their experiment, the American public was "brainwashed by the worshippers of John Dewey," and "the progressives had acquired such a strangle-hold in the field of education that no one could expect to advance in that field unless he or she burned incense to John Dewey." Equally pernicious has been the "outcome-based education" movement, which proposes "cookie-cutter" performance standards that represent a "dumbed-down egalitarian scheme that stifles individual potential for excellence and achievement by holding the entire class to a level of learning attainable by every child " ‘Cooperative learning’ is stressed by organizing virtually all learning activities into group activities. Group thinking is in; individual thinking and capitalism is out." Instead of absolutes, students determine what ‘they’ consider values (acceptable) to them. There are no absolutes.It is fostered by psychologiest (sic) who know virtually nothing about education and curriculum. These ‘experts’ know nothing about scope and sequence in determining educational objectives for children." Dewey’s most egregious sin? Promulgating a system devoted to student interests instead of facts. "In an OBE system, academic and factual subject matter is replaced by vague and subjective learning outcomes. Facts are the bedrock of all things we need to know. Facts are the foundation. Without a foundation, the building will not stand." Children’s interests, on the other hand, are fleeting and more a matter of whim than of God’s will. Further, outcome-based education is "socialist," because "Students learn that the ‘state’ provides their needs, and become dependent on the ‘state.’" Because outcome-based education envisions universal educational standards, it "thus is dedicated to the establishment of globalism. National sovereignty should be under the control of a world authority, according to OBE." The result: "teachers ... will be required to fit the ‘role performance’ in order to obtain and renew certification. This ‘role’ may be odious to some teachers. They will be expected to go with the flow and fit the new mold of the reinvented school of education reformers' dreams. They will be required to violate their conscience and convictions in numerous instances outlined above, such as demonstrating that they know how to refer their students to the local in-house or down-the street school-based sex clinic for condoms and abortion referrals.... In the near future, teacher certification will not be possible for the true God-fearing, Bible believing Christians." It is not clear to me how Dewey’s so-called "situational ethics"--described as "relativism" and blamed for undermining the traditional authority of the Bible--is consistent with the allegedly universalistic goals of outcome-based education. But both relativism and universalism are--according to Cates--diametrically opposed to the will of God, and are causing the world to fall into sin and despair. Cates’ solution? Homeschooling with a back-to-basics curriculum involving mental discipline and a commitment to finding God’s ultimate purpose for each individually. "A God-centered pattern of education demands that the Christian educator spell out clearly the processes involved in the total structure of the curriculum. This means all procedures and processes must be based on a definite theory of knowledge... the Bible is to be the point of reference from which we can evaluate all other areas and sources of knowledge." A representative of the second type of website critical of John Dewey is Capitalism Magazine’s site at http://capmag.com. Many articles are available that discuss contemporary threats to the capitalist way of life. Dewey is blamed specifically for the rise of teen violence (http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=11). The progressive emphasis on children’s social interests to the detriment of intellectual interests has undermined the ability to make distinctions between right and wrong. "The Progressive philosophy maintains that the cause of social strife is the unwillingness of an individual to sacrifice his or her convictions to the group. The insistence on distinctions such as ‘true versus false’ and ‘right versus wrong’ generates social conflict. If only children did not hold strong ideas, disagreement and conflict would evaporate in the sunshine of social harmony. Truth, therefore, is socially fractious, while ignorance is bliss. Hence, what the Progressives mean by ‘socialization’ is the surrender of one's mind, of one's independent knowledge and judgment--to a ‘group consensus.’ According to Dewey, ‘The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.’" This particular quote, by the way, is used again and again by the anti-Dewey folks to prove that he is opposed to the teaching of facts or of truth. (See also http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/anarchy.html). The author offers a solution: "Fundamentally, schools must institute a radical reversal of policy. What they need to teach is not "socialization," but cognition. Schools need to encourage individual, independent judgment and to provide the factual knowledge and the reasoning skills that a rational mind requires." Dewey’s approach is taken to represent the opposite approach. (Of course, there is never any discussion of Dewey’s concept of intelligence, or of his strong distinction between the ‘valued’ and the ‘valuable.’) A careful look at the Capitalism Magazine website reveals an underlying commitment to the "objectivist" philosophy of Ayn Rand (See http://www.capitalism.org/tour/index.htm.) The basic principles of objectivism are stated as: "Reality is Absolute; Reason is man’s [sic] means of survival; The individual is sovereign; Man is an end in himself, not a slave to the ends of ‘society’; To live in a society man needs rights; Rights are moral principles; The initiation of physical force renders a man’s mind useless; Government’s job is to project rights; Government has a monopoly on the use of physical force; The powers of the state shall never be used to initiate force; and A rule not of men, but of objective laws." The site also claims that Capitalism is "the progressive ideal," and represents the only social system that is "true, both in philosophical theory and in economic practice." Nowhere is democracy mentioned (except in reference to the "whim" of the "mob"), nor any sense that individuals share interdependency within society. The Ayn Rand institute maintains a site with numerous articles written from an objectivist viewpoint. Many of these articles contain the exact same criticisms as the articles on the Capitalism Magazine site. One article (http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/businessmenhonesty.shtml) claims that Dewey’s "vicious philosophy" of pragmatism has caused the current crisis of business dishonesty. "For more than 100 years our intellectuals, specifically our college professors, have been teaching students, including, future businessmen, that no absolute principles or standards exist, that you cannot be certain of anything, that the future is unknowable, that it is okay to try anything without thinking, that the truth is simply that which works at the moment, and that which works is what makes you feel better right now. In other words, there is nothing really wrong with dishonesty.... Anyone who questions this philosophy is mocked as a dogmatic, narrow-minded, preachy moralist. Pragmatism is an open invitation to fraud--after all, you might get away with it and the money makes you feel good." According to this article, an effort is needed to replace pragmatism with "an objective system of morality that identifies what virtue is and how one should practice it. Only two, but radically different, types of moral absolutism exist today: religion, with a morality based on faith, and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, with a morality based on reason. Both advocate the virtue of honesty, but only Objectivism demonstrates why honesty is a virtue and dishonesty self-destructive." Here objectivism, like the other primary source of criticism of Dewey (that is, Christian fundamentalism), reveals itself as essentially dogmatic. The Ayn Rand web site also includes articles specifically devoted to educational topics, such as the debate between whole language and phonics (http://education.aynrand.org/wars.html). Dewey is identified as the intellectual father of the whole language approach, which believes "that the child must be encouraged to follow his feelings irrespective of the facts, and to have his arbitrary ‘opinions’ regarded as valid. On this premise, the child is told to treat the ‘whole word’ as a primary, and to draw his conclusions without the necessity of learning the underlying facts. Another article (http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/school.shtml) decries Dewey’s influence on the intellectual rigor of elementary schools. "More and more, our schools are de-emphasizing "subject-centered" learning and concentrating instead on the student’s emotional capacity and social activities. Encouraging "self-expression" is deemed more important than teaching the distinction between objectively right and wrong answers. Many classes present little or no lecturing by the teacher, featuring instead group discussions in which all opinions--no matter how arbitrary--are held to be equally valuable." This is epitomized in the emphasis on self-esteem and the progressive movement to eliminate ability grouping. Why have the schools given up the goal of intellectual training? "The Progressive theory, originated by the American philosopher John Dewey, rejects the very idea that the purpose of education is cognitive training. Dewey and his followers believe that schools are places where the child vents his emotions and, above all, is ‘socialized.’" The article again quotes Dewey about the importance of social interests. Since the progressives "believe that their goal is not to teach the young how to think, they see no need to teach intellectually rigorous subjects. Rather, their goal is to guide students toward some happy medium between ‘self-expression’ and obedience to the group-- i.e., between mindless emotionalism and equally mindless conformity. In another article (http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/op-eds/selfesteem.txt) the same author claims that "in the view of our Dewey-inspired educators, logic is a ‘straitjacket.’ Students are taught by "progressive" educators that there are no rigid principles in life, and that emotion, not reason, is one's link to reality. Thus, if a child is somehow made to feel good about himself, he is good--irrespective of whether there exists any objective basis for that conclusion." This approach has produced "such nightmarish phenomena as inventive spelling, whereby a fourth-grader who spells ‘favorite’ as ‘fffifit’ is lauded by the teacher for expressing a ‘creative feeling.’" "Erase the concept of truth--these educators maintain--and a child will never discover that he is thinking or acting wrongly. If he is taught that anything he does is right because he feels it, he will always ‘feel good’ about himself."The objectivist criticism of Dewey is shared by people who devote themselves to saving the world from the influence of psychiatry and psychology. One identifiable group is the "Foundation for Truth in Reality," which runs a website called "Say No to Psychiatry"(http://www.sntp.net). The site includes numerous articles claiming that Dewey and others are part of a vast conspiracy called "The Order" that is attempting to take control of people’s minds through experiments based on the doctrine of behaviorism. For example, one article http://www.sntp.net/education/sutton_dewey.htm) claims, "Looking back at John Dewey after 80 years of his influence, he can be recognized as the pre-eminent factor in the collectivisation, or Hegelianization, of American Schools....Dewey's education is not child centered but State centered, because for the Hegelian, ‘social ends’ are always State ends." Interpreting Dewey’s quote that education is ‘not a preparation for future living," the article describes Dewey as primarily interested in creating conformity to the State:"The Dewey educational system does not accept the role of developing a child's talents but, contrarily, only to prepare the child to function as a unit in an organic whole - in blunt terms a cog in the wheel of an organic society. Whereas most Americans have moral values rooted in the individual, the values of the school system are rooted in the Hegelian concept of the State as the absolute... for Dewey man has no individual rights. Man exists only to serve the State. This is directly contradictory to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." That Dewey is a behaviorist is proven through a reference to Dewey’s claim that the function of the teacher is to design educational experiences (http://www.sntp.net/education/education.htm), and reference to the fact that his student, John Watson, disavowed the mind entirely. Dewey’s own "experiments with children" at the Laboratory School are further evidence of his evil intent (http://www.sntp.net/education/leipzig_connection_7.htm). Once again, reference is made to Dewey’s quote about social interests being paramount over "exclusively individual" intellectual interests. According to the anti-psychiatry web site, Dewey’s intended transformation of the educational system is nearly complete. "There are no ‘education specialists’ who aren't now actually behavioral psychologists or psychiatrists. The field of psychology has very much taken over the public school system, and is doing its best to take over private schools. Through covert tactics, extensive lobbying efforts, and setting government mandated ‘educational standards’, even home-schooling may have to conform to the dictates of psychologists." The implication--borne out through a careful reading of additional articles from the website, is that the psychologists desire this conformity so that certain unnamed interests may take over the world without dissent. Specifically, the system is "dumbing down our students so they will work for lower wages to allow American businesses to compete in the world market" (http://www.sntp.net/education/OBE_1.htm). What ties each of these types of criticisms together is nostalgia for a remembered past in which schooling was intellectually rigorous and demanding, focused primarily on the teaching of facts and truth and the formation of mental discipline, leaving social and moral development to homes and churches. Central to this memory is the importance of local control, and with it the freedom for ordinary persons--without fancy intellectual credentials or complicated theories of human development--to conduct schooling in the manner in which they see fit, without interference from government bureaucrats or university "experts" who seek to impose their will on local communities. According to this view, everything local is true, and wise, and good, while everything remote--especially that which comes out eastern or European urban universities--is to be feared and avoided at all costs. What is interesting to me about the anti-Dewey critics is that none of them seem to have actually read Dewey or tried to understand the context of his statements about the importance of social interests or education as life rather than preparation for life. Rather, the critics seem to be reading only each other, borrowing the quotations that seem most pernicious, in an attempt not just to smear Dewey’s reputation but to draw into question the entire educational system and the academic theories that support it. The lack of real detail about Dewey’s writings or values, and the willingness to use broad labels such as "progressive" and "behaviorist" so loosely, are evidence--it seems to me--that Dewey’s role for these critics is not that of the thoughtful philosopher making a serious attempt to reconstruct schools to meet contemporary needs, but rather that of a nearly blank screen upon which the critics can project their own fears and insecurities. Dewey has become the sacrificial lamb, subjected to the projected shadow of the right wing, allowing them to demonize entire professions and institutions without fear that their followers might actually look at Dewey’s work to see for themselves whether he is as evil as they say. It seems to me that Dewey’s critics have mischaracterized him as an enemy of reason and of the individual. On the other hand, Dewey certainly does vociferously reject their atomistic metaphysics of individuality and their claims to an unbiased understanding of absolute truth as revealed in the Bible or unfettered "reason." A careful reading of Democracy and Education or Human Nature and Conduct reveals numerous passages where Dewey undermines the simplistic views expressed by these critics. So, while they mischaracterize him and demonize him, their choice of the mind-mannered philosopher as the target of their criticism is not without merit. For Dewey provides an intellectually rigorous pathway out of absolutism and into a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of rights, freedom, law, and morality. It might just behoove these critics to keep their followers away from Dewey’s books, by painting them so starkly as enemies of reason. This might be the best chance they have to keep their flocks away from realizing that things are not as simple as they seem. \Note: Coming up in a furture edition of Insights will be a brief discussion of how to copy my Dewey "favorites" (bookmarks) from my web site to your computer. |