Ep. 249: Dewey on Education and Thought (Part Two)

0:00 Dylan: So Rousseau says we have to be forced to be free. And Dewey would say we have to be educated to be free.

0:05 Jonathan: Freedom isn't free, free, free to mind fray.

0:07 Wes: Gotta have some troops as well. So where are we in the book?

0:12 Mark: We're in chapter two.

0:13 Jonathan: Still Education is a social function. This is the chapter where he starts. I mean, how, in a way, how we think was about the individual. It's about what the skill set of the individual in order to be able to think reflectively and all the benefits that go into that. And the rest of the book is about. About the mechanisms, the educational mechanisms that make that happen. I think, Mark, you brought up. Society requires continuity. I think Dewey says if we were all immortal, right, we wouldn't necessarily have to teach our children to carry on the mores of society because we would all continue in it. But because we are mortal, if we want our society to continue, we have to train the young to prepare to take their role. And that process of society perpetuating itself is called education. And that's really what the second chapter is all about.

1:05 Wes: The second chapter gets us into some of the mechanisms of education. And it's about the environment in the sense that the kind of environment we put people into elicit certain types of responses. So he has this definition of the environment. So one example of this, and this is something that will come up several times in this chapter. But part of that environment is just the approval or disapproval of others. So. So this, of course, is very basic with children. Part of the way they learn is they get positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement for the things they do. Dewey wants to elaborate on that sort of conditioning. There has to be something more to education, but that's where it begins. And that's the social environment in which education begins.

1:51 Mark: I like this quote at the beginning of section two. The social environment within chapter two, Other people are the indispensable conditions of the realization of a person's tendencies, which to me says much more. I mean, it's not even just approval and disapproval, but like, you know, action is just literally meaningless without other people. That is the whole. It seems like it's an argument against the Robinson Crusoe view of the individual. We are social animal. This is his way of saying that

2:18 Jonathan: Kathy talks about at one point about a businessman who only does business with himself. Would make no sense. It's the same way we are part of a society.

2:26 Seth: What he says specifically is that it's about a shared goal. It's the fact that you can direct somebody to do an activity, or you can direct a child to do an activity. But if they don't understand the outcome and the goal, or if they don't feel like they're participating in accomplishing that goal with you, then they're just going through the motions. It's like training a dog. And I guess this goes back to the points you guys were making earlier about awakening something that's innate in human beings. Or, you know, that education isn't about creating something new, but about taking an existing faculty.

But the point he's trying to make, which I thought was another really profound point, is it's in our projects, in the world that we gain meaning, that we discover meaning, that we create meaning. And in a sense, that it's with those projects that we learn. So in engaging in an activity with an outcome that I understand to be shared or participatory, or at least mimetic beyond memetic, if I'm just aping what you're doing, I'm not learning. But if I am understanding that we are sharing in that activity and that there's an outcome that I'm trying to achieve, then it becomes education or learning.

3:41 Wes: He distinguishes two sorts of ways that you might learn in the sense or the way you might educate a human being or an animal by doing things that will change their habits, basically. So one of them is just purely external types of conditioning. And he gives the example of a horse where you might train it to do something by bribing it with food, essentially, which is something that will change behavior. You can condition changes behavior, certainly, and that does correspond to something happening in the brain and the mind. But it's not the same thing as the sort of education that will change change dispositions, which is something word we hear a lot in philosophy.

It's associated also with Aristotle's Aristotelian virtue associated with character and habit. So the basis of habit. So there's a certain kind of education that can change emotional dispositions towards certain kind of behaviors. So that it's not just that the child ends up doing something because it wants to get bribed with food like the horse. It's that they really. Seth, you know what you're talking about. About. They find themselves participating in a common activity. They have their impulses modified. They share ideas and emotions with others.

They're animated by those same sorts of things. And so, for instance, getting at your idea of a project, Seth, when the project fails, they'll feel it as their own failure. And when it succeeds, they'll feel it as their own success. And that sort of investment is different from just getting your hand burned because you touch the stove or something like that. It's a way of assimilating the beliefs and sharing them with the social group as a whole.

5:22 Seth: Much more well said.

5:24 Mark: I think Dewey probably underestimates the degree to which animals can have their interests changed through conditioning. That he says that if you reward your horse with a carrot when he walks around the way you want him to, but ultimately he doesn't care about the walking around. He doesn't care about going to the place. He just cares about the carrot. You can do whatever conditioning you want, but really his interest focuses still on the carrot. But is that really true? Because, you know you can then stop giving him the carrot and he'll still do this stuff.

5:50 Wes: Well, he doesn't know why he's doing it, though. He's just conditioned. It's like a.

5:54 Dylan: Well, there might be other kinds of gratification. I mean, horses Dogs in particular are classic examples of this. Right. Is that there are multiple kinds of gratification. And I think, Mark is right, that there's pretty clearly a range of kinds of learning and conditioning and levels of gratification in the animal kingdom.

6:13 Wes: We should say that just because you take the stimulus away and the behavior still continues doesn't mean that it's not pure conditioning. It occurs at such a low level. And of course animals can't articulate why they're doing things. And even in us, Dewey will talk about the unconscious. And a lot of this stuff is procedural types of knowledge and things that happen outside of our awareness that we're conditioned to do by rewards and punishments, essentially. And we have to keep in mind the distinction between higher level stuff. So some of this, for instance, he gets to language and he's right on about this language. I mean, he seems very ahead of his time. But the concept of language as being fundamentally based in shared intention and shared ends is right on. And that's really what has to be happening to go above this learning as conditioning level of education.

7:04 Jonathan: He's not saying that training doesn't take place and has no role clear that it does. And so. But is it educative? I think is the question for him, is it something that you build an education system around? Because again, getting back to his sort of conception of the person, the person, like all other organisms, they interact with the environment, they learn from that. And you can make analogies to animals, obviously, but we're operating at such a higher level that we can do more than be trained. And I think his conception of the human as an organism interacting with its environment and coming into the world with a certain number of set of impulses and then through those impulses having experiences that lead to more experiences that eventually grow into habits.

So that's the chain of reasoning for Dewey as to how we learn. And getting back to Peirce, there's all kinds of ways you can take that in really unproductive ways, one of which is authority. Right? Your entire education system can be based on what you were just talking about in terms of training, right? Carrots and sticks. You will obey authority figures. And in fact, that's what a society that is stuck in the sort of cake of custom is all about, right? That the society is formed and they have educational principles, but the educational principles are around getting every member to conform to a set of pre existing beliefs that cannot be challenged.

And that is a way society can be organized. That's not the way Dewey thinks our society should Be organized. And through that, you need education that is not based on the same set of techniques you would use to train an animal or train a small child. It's moving into, as Wes talked about, these shared experiences, right, that no kid knows what a hat is because the letters H, A, and T make sense in terms of a thing you put on your head. They know about it because. Because they've had hats put on their head and described as hats. They've seen their parents wear hats and then use the word.

9:06 Wes: One of the things he talks about is having a shared end, right? Him and mom want to go out. The hat is the thing you put on your head before you go out. And it's those sorts of functions that objects have and the shared ends that people have in their relations to those objects. That's the sorts of things on which meaning and language is based.

9:29 Jonathan: Exactly right. And that's what his educational model is predicated on, is the notion of giving students a sense of an end or a shared end towards an educational project. So that's where the blank slate model of the human mind is not about that. It's about writing onto that blank slate as efficiently and effectively as possible the right ideas. What Dewey is talking about as educational experiences, not that they're entirely driven by the student based on whatever they're interested in, but that if a student has a particular interest and they're faced with a problem, something that will generate doubt in their minds, and then the teacher can then channel that doubt into productive, reflective directions that has a goal in mind, and that's really his sort of model for education.

10:19 Mark: Did Dewey invent Wittgenstein's meaning as use doctrine? I was seeing that in here, the example of the hat.

10:24 Wes: Yeah, I thought of that too.

10:26 Mark: Well, Wittgenstein was slumming around in the Tractatus. Dewey was. Dewey's just awesome. I gotta just say somebody asked me, I was on another podcast talking about Nietzsche, and they were then asked me, like, who's your favorite philosopher afterwards? And I was like, well, I really like reading Nietzsche, but based on what we just said about all the ways that he could be misinterpreted, he shouldn't be my favorite philosophy. But, like, I feel. I feel like Dewey has so many of the insights of Nietzsche and of Heidegger and of these other people, but writes in a way that you can actually understand. And I don't know, there's just very little in here that I disagree with.

10:58 Jonathan: It's funny because he also was controversial in education circles and often because he's misinterpreted, you know, because he was progressive. And like James and an educator, he sort of lumped in with progressive education, which at the time and still today is perceived as do away with the formal curriculum. Let children sort of choose everything on their own. The teacher is not the authority bringing knowledge from on high, but just somebody there to water the garden.

11:26 Dylan: Sounds like the Montessori school.

11:28 Jonathan: He was contemporary with Montessori, but, you know, Montessori also is very directed. I mean, there is a very solid curriculum that students must get through. There's techniques to get through. And Dewey, in a way, was just as hostile to progressive educators who felt that anything that didn't involve a teacher lecturing from the front of the room was superior to all other forms of education. You know, Dewey had explicit things in mind. I mean, we're talking about them now, right? There's a certain way of thinking he wanted everybody to learn kind of reflective thinking. There were values that he thought the school should imbue in students, which were fundamentally democratic. So it was. It was not that he was averse to content.

12:14 Wes: It sounds like a liberal arts education, right?

12:16 Jonathan: No, I think you're right. I can't remember exactly where. I think he was contrasting the sort of instrumental education, the education for the future of work that grew out of the complexity of a modern society with a modern economy. And I don't think he was sort of necessarily hostile to that. In fact, I think like Montessori and other educational innovators, he. He saw an important use for craft, the notion of learning a craft alongside learning content, less explicitly in his work, but definitely there. But, yeah, I would say this was an argument for the liberal arts bringing forth the sort of philosophical, reflective way of thinking, the sort of democratic, positive values, appreciation for aesthetics, all those things that you want an educated person to have.

13:01 Wes: I think, too, the idea which I I associate with the liberal arts education, that we're not just passive receptacles to be filled with the right information, the right values, or to be socially constructed by discourse. To take another example, we can be educated in such a way, and this will get us towards chapter four in plasticity, but we can be educated in such a way that induces habits that we might associate with freedom, including freedom of thought. So we can develop habits which are not just these passive things they do, but a new way of creatively achieving our ends. For instance, whatever goals we have.

13:43 Jonathan: Habit is a tricky word, right, because we associate it with bad habits or unthinking habits. And that's not really what he's talking about here. He's talking about really exactly what Wes talked about. The habit to be an open minded thinker. The habit to feel yourself as part of a democratic society. And those habits don't have to be in conflict. Right. That quote I read earlier was showing that in fact the democratic society wants a variety of people with a variety of interests and a variety of projects and goals. And so cultivating those types of habits actually create the better individual. And a better individual is somebody who recognizes that he is not, not isolated but is part of something wider.

14:29 Wes: Yeah, he talks about active habits versus passive habits. But the active habit involves the ability to transform one's environment. Right. And that's related to the ability to conduct experiments, to do the sort of thinking, reflective thinking that we talked about with the previous reading and so on,

14:47 Mark: versus habituation, which is his word for the passive habit. Merely adapting to the existing environment.

14:52 Wes: Right.

14:53 Jonathan: Don't forget the habits we pick up, even if they're not necessarily closed minded, don't all have to be healthy. His sort of rejection of dualism, for example, I think he would say that the sort of mind body separation is something that leads to kind of radical individualism. Right. If the whole world is potentially going on in my entire head, why can't I be an individual distinct from society? So I think that's one of the reasons he is pushing this worldview that not only are we not disembodied brains who may or may not be interacting with things in themselves, but thinking itself is the consequences of the million interactions we have with our environment. We can't separate ourselves from our environment. Our thinking is completely wound up in it.

15:44 Mark: I was thinking during part of this, of our talk with Francis Fukuyama, this political culture that he thinks education should try to establish in us, it is kind of programmatic. It's not merely focusing on the individual and what nourishment that individual seems to need. Because again, we don't have a fixed telos, we don't have a fixed end. Even individuals don't have a fixed end. Growing to become who you are might be Nietzsche's slogan. I'm not actually sure that it's Dewey's. I think that he might have a little more what we are is ever growing, being beings with a capacity for flourishing.

I think he might be closer to Aristotle than he is to Nietzsche in some ways, even though he's obviously, you know, emphasizes the power of the individual. He talks about society as having so many it's too complicated. So that one of the things that formal education is supposed to do, even though, you know, we get most of our education from just being in society and being with people and doing things with people, there are just too many different influences. And he does feel. Feel like a good education should purge the bad ones. Should that. He thinks that probably do we think a lot of popular culture is saturated with bad taste.

And so this is one of the things that education is supposed to do.

16:50 Wes: Well, he does say though, that bad taste is not reversible. Right. A lot of our initial dispositions are just set by family. They are set by that accidental learning that goes on and just social proximity to people. So if we come out of that with bad taste, we can take plenty of art history courses or whatever, whatever, and still not be able to rectify that because that's formal schooling and it's not ever going to give us that vital gut level connection that we need. It's the part where he's talking about the social medium as educative.

17:24 Dylan: This is section three of chapter two. He talks about manners and he talks about good taste and aesthetic appreciation. If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged and over decorated, decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey secondhand information as to what others think. Such taste never becomes spontaneous and personally ingrained, but remains a labored reminder of what those think to whom one has been taught to look up what the

18:02 Wes: people who know better think. You're like, okay, that's what I should think, because that's what people who know better think. But I still like monster truck rallies, basically, not the museum.

18:15 Dylan: It may be sort of a discussion about how. What kind of habits those aesthetic ones of environment are. It sounds to me a lot like the way in which in large part we always have a kind of soft spot for home where a kind of nature. I have had this conversation with numerous people that like, when I moved out to Maryland, I realized then how much of a Midwesterner I was. I did not realize that I was a Midwesterner in the sense that I felt like, well, I could just live anywhere. I could live in all kinds of places and feel comfortable. And I lived in a place that was sort of only marginally different.

I mean, it's not like I was in Some incredibly different cultural context, but I just didn't feel very much at home. And I had the same conversation with one of my students, and she was from the country of Georgia, and she talked about the same thing that she just felt this just tremendous kind of pull of where she grew up. That's what this kind of thing sounds to me, like that there's something about that environment that you're born into that's very hard to shake.

19:25 Jonathan: I said, being half Milwaukee, and I always knew you were a Midwestern.

19:29 Wes: Midwesterners are just nicer, right?

19:32 Seth: That's the story. Anyway, it's true.

19:35 Wes: It's absolutely true.

19:36 Dylan: When we moved here, completely unbidden by me, my youngest son, who is now 20 today, after like a couple days, he just walks down and says, everyone is just so nice here, so much nicer here than they are in Maryland. It was just.

19:55 Jonathan: But I mean, actually this brings up an interesting point. We are all part of many communities. So, you know, when Dewey's talking about what education is going to prepare us for in a modern society, one of them is to live. And you didn't call it a multicultural society, but one in which we are going to be introduced to many more communities than we would just on our own. And this sort of gets back to what a sort of doueyin school might look like. Because there are things in this chapter where he talks about this has already been said. You pick up a lot of what you know, your initial language, manners, you know, sort of values.

You do all that mostly outside of school. So what can you do? And what could school do, right? If we were a simple society, if we were a sort of think it was like a savage society, you wouldn't need formal education because everything you would need to know you would pick up from your environment. So in school, you need to pick up those things that might not be easily accessible at home. But as a result of that, school has to have certain characteristics, right? It has to simplify the real world. It has to extract from the real world the things that are deemed to be important for students to be exposed to.

It must have values such as, you know, we just talked about introducing people to a variety of cultures that they might not encounter otherwise. And it has to transmit information that is not close to the surface. I think he has a quote here. The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own. And yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves in the surface of our ordinary experience. As a result, those are the type of topics that should be covered in the artificial environment we call school.

21:44 Mark: See him talking about the diversity that people come from. From. I thought that was not that school is supposed to introduce us to each other's diversity, but that diversity is sort of a threat. This is why I was bringing the Fukuyama thing is because Fukuyama seemed to think that we needed as a nation, a shared national identity. And I think this is something that Dewey is arguing for. You know, it's those critical thinking tools. And I'm not sure if when he says, you know, when we're talking about liberal arts education, if he really means a great books education like our whole St. John's discussion. Allan Bloom.

22:20 Wes: I'm just kidding.

22:20 Mark: You could have a Dewey pro St. John's and a Dewey anti. St. John's debate, I think, would be very lively. I don't know that we need to do it here, but at the very least, you know, it's bringing these people who have all these different diverse backgrounds to a common experience that gives us a shared set of purposes and attitudes. It's very much not a Rawlsian. We have certain rules by which we deal with each other, but other than that diversity and. And differences of opinion, everything should flourish. Like. No, I think he really. Well, not. Obviously he's not preaching conformity. We need a shared identity.

22:56 Wes: So he kind of goes both ways on this. It's towards the end of the chapter. So he'll say, on the one hand, so these are the three functions of schools that he goes through. And Jonathan kind of gave a good summary of them. The one we're talking about is the third one. And so on the one hand, he'll say, part of the function is to escape from the limitations of the social group in which we're born. So we come into contact with a broader and I assume, more diverse environment so that we maximize the different sorts of formative dispositions that act on us.

But on the other hand, schooling has to mark. The point you were getting at is he'll talk about a homogeneous and balanced environment. That's a quotation. And the point of that there's an integration function to school where we're confronted with all sorts of different influences. The influence is involved in belonging to all sorts of different groups and being exposed to different sorts of groups and different sorts of people. And they will have an antagonistic pull. Those things tend to habituate us in different directions. And it will call on us to have different sorts of judgments and have different sorts of emotions in response to the same stimuli.

And what school has to do is to give us a way of navigating that. It has to have that integrating quality.

24:12 Dylan: Yeah. So the second one, you. Or the third one, which is really where his democratic objectives come into, to allow us to escape the limitations of our social group into which we're born. The second one is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes.

24:32 Wes: I wasn't actually referring to. To that, but I mean, it's worth talking about, but I was. What I'm talking about comes down later in the third.

24:38 Dylan: It's at least in line with it. It establishes as a purified medium of action and the end of it, it says, as a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. Footnote Plato.

24:58 Wes: Yeah. So we decide on a canon, as Jonathan put. But we figure out what we think is important. That's part of our task. If we set up a school, we have to say, all right, what's important and what's optional, or what's, as he puts it, some things are trivial or even perverse.

25:13 Dylan: And also, very importantly, he's arguing that our environment shapes who we are. And in fact, the beginning of this section, he says we never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. So he's very strong in that statement that it's not what we're actually teaching you that matters anything. It's really the environment that we build that educate. And it's going so far as to say that the character and the capacities and the understandings of justice and value are part of the environment that we live in, directly affected by it.

25:46 Wes: Yeah. In this context, though, the school is the relevant environment. It's the controlled environment that we are looking for for this sort of formal education.

25:55 Jonathan: With regard to diversity. I mean, Dewey was. Many people today saw assimilation as a great progressive value. And I think at the very end of the chapter, he talks about the assimilative force of the American public school as an eloquent testimony to their efficiency at this common and balanced appeal. For a bit of context, that there was an author, Cochrane Graham, who wrote about the history of the American education system as progressing through a series of ages that all began with the letter A and won't get into all of them, but the first one and the one that they were sort of coming out of when Dewey was forming, his beliefs was sort of the Age of assimilation, when the point of school was to not just assimilate a bunch of immigrants with sort of strange customs, the American way of life, but assimilating the kids who were coming out of the farm and going to school for the first time.

Essentially getting these sort of generations of people from different lands, including lands within America, and getting them ready for sort of modernity. So in that case, assimilation was of great value. And so the school was there to, you know, which is. Wes talked about this sort of simplified microcosm of the society that we want to create.

27:08 Wes: I'll just read from the last paragraph because this is what I was getting at. So there's the value of being exposed to diverse sorts of groups. Although, as he notes, some groups are going to have better formative influences than others. The point that one of the lines of I like in this is a clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail provide educative environments. Those are sorts of education for those who enter into their collective or conjoined activities as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership or a political party.

There's all sorts of different social contexts and social influences. And part of the function a lot of that it is valuable just to have a diversity of influences. But school, school, beyond giving us that diversity also. So the way he puts it, the school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters. One code prevails in the family, another in the street, a third in the workshop or store, a fourth in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls and is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for different occasions.

This danger imposes upon the school a steadying and integrating office. So I think that's part of what was giving Mark. Correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, but Mark, the feeling that there's something more going on here than celebrating diversity, I

28:35 Mark: can't avoid reflecting on. Like, would he be in favor of a. These are the great books that everyone must learn. Like, I think you'd be much more likely to. The democratic ideal means we should be. As long as these things are compatible with the overall ethic of progressive ethic that he's trying to put forward, then we should be pulling things for our reading list that represent the various populations that are involved. So adding African American literature to the canon, like, it seems like he would be all for that because like, those are members of the populace, they're part of the classroom room.

And there's no moral justification to say that's all in bad taste or something like that. No, in fact, James Baldwin or, you know, some of these stories of triumph and, or suffering like these totally show exactly what we want to teach people as part of our shared program about the human condition.

29:31 Jonathan: I think you got two educative threads that this concept relates to. You know, obviously in his time he wasn't dealing with, with diversity of canon, but he was dealing with the significance of content. And how do you balance at that time a canon of content with a need of each individual student. And if you look at his model, it really is. Teachers must move from thinking of students as a sort of undifferentiated group or maybe at best a group where you separate the kids who are going to do well and dump everybody else. You know, Mark, what you're criticizing at the beginning of the show to one where it's a teacher's role to really know and understand each child as an individual and their interests.

And then you want to play to those interests but not say, okay, well whatever you're interested in or whatever literature you want to read, you can read that and only that you want to understand that interest well enough so that you can present each child with a problem, a doubt inducing problem that will interest them enough so that they will be troubled by the doubt and thus the problem process of moving towards becoming a reflective thinker will take place. That's the teacher's role, but there still is foundational knowledge they want that child to have how to become a reflective thinker.

So I think it's less about assimilation as grinding everybody down to a certain homogeneity which is totally undoing in concept. It's more like if you get back to his vision of like what it is to be a human right, we interact with environment. Well, part of environment are all the cliques and clubs and gangs and Fagin's households that Wes just read out. Right? That's just part of our environment and we have to navigate it. And in some cases we have control over, in some cases we not. But in that context, what makes school unique is school is the only environment that's deliberate.

It's the only environment where we could say we are going to set goals for this particular environment that we want everybody coming in to accomplish. They're not going to get that necessarily in their own household. They're not going to to get that in their club or their gang, but they can get that at school. So what he's really advocating is for is, well, now that we know that's what school is for in a modern society, what do we choose to make a priority?

31:45 Mark: We're learning tools, so it's less a matter of the content. So if you're asking should we make our students read Homer, you just have to evaluate that in terms of can we teach it in a way that is going to give them the mental habits? You know, one of those habits might be, as we discussed in our great books thing of the ability to, to connect to a long distant culture that is really useful to make us stop and question our current situation and problematize that good kind of hesitation. But if it were really just transmitting what is already dominant in the culture that we're only going to read the Founding Fathers or something like that, then there might be just too much of that. That's not serving the purpose anymore.

32:29 Dylan: It is the. Did that just fall into training versus education?

32:33 Jonathan: Well, it's kind of dogma. I mean, I think he would be as hostile to a dogma of this is the content, this is the canon, and you will learn this and nothing else. But I think it would be equally hostile to a dogma that said the child and the child alone shall decide what interests them and what they will learn.

32:52 Dylan: He certainly is a democratic dogmatist. If he'd want to go far as to say that he's a partisan of democratic democracy and convinced that democracy cultivates the virtues of its citizens both for its own success, that is best set to cultivate those virtues that are the most flourishing form of human beings. Well, I mean, I guess that's the third. One of his criteria for a school definitely pointed towards that.

33:18 Jonathan: And we didn't, you know, read because there's chapters devoted to teaching science, teaching geography. So there is a sort of substance. But even there he takes an interesting tack that learning math, learning science, science should not be sort of provided pre digested to the students because then there's no end in mind, there's no purpose to it. He talks about, I can't remember which chapter it is about how learning math by sort of understanding why Euclid was such a breakthrough or what did the math of Ptolemy mean to those who used it. Then you're, I mean, I'm talking to the converted here, but the fact that fourth graders are doing mathematics that took civilizations hundreds of years to conceive and perfect, that shouldn't be fed to students with this Notion of like, here it is, it's already done.

They need to understand where they came from. The same way kind of education moves you through this sort of evolutionary cycle, right? You're born, you're helpless, you're inquisitive. Society keeps you alive, you know, your parents, et cetera. The educative system meets you where you're at, at each level of your stage in human growth. That's one thing that's sort of cornerstone of Dewey, but another one is that the content that we learn, there may be stuff that is canonical, but it needs to be presented directly as the result of a legacy that you have inherited.

So you'll understand its origin and its ends. It won't be just this thing that sort of is magically dropped in your lap. And I know you guys have talked about that in the context of Newtonian physics and science in the past.

34:55 Mark: Maybe we should get some of these habit's. Basically chapter four is what I'm pointing at.

34:59 Wes: Yeah, let's get to that because it's the best one.

35:03 Mark: What did we learn about habit in here that we haven't talked about yet?

35:06 Wes: I think it's worth starting in the beginning and talking about his concepts of growth and immaturity, his idea that immaturity is not a lack. We don't have to think of it in terms of something that is just waiting to be filled up so that it reaches this static ideal, which is the mature, immature person or organism that no longer needs to grow. It's a special kind of power, right? It's a positive force. Children are little sponges. They're incredible learners, and that's what their immaturity essentially represents.

35:41 Dylan: And that growth is not something done to a child, it's something that they do. So growing is an activity, not something that is pulled out of something.

35:51 Wes: Yeah, he uses this word, educe, right?

35:54 Dylan: Yeah.

35:54 Wes: We don't have to educe positive activities from the child, as some educational doctrines would have it. Where there's life, there are already eager and impassioned activities. So we just have to harness those, shape them.

36:06 Jonathan: And I think somebody talks about the child with respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems. We may say the child should be growing in manhood with respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness and openness of mind. We may say that the adult should be growing into childlikeness.

36:26 Wes: Yeah, that's very good.

36:28 Mark: I almost read this, that exact quote at the beginning when we were debating whether the scientific method was natural, because, well, in A sense it's entirely unnatural. Right. Only the adult has control of these tools. And that's why we have specialized schools to get them a handle on these abstract things. But it grows out of this thing that is very much natural, very much childlike, and, in fact, that mature adults often lose. So that really makes. I think that quote really makes it clear in what ways the scientific method is natural and what ways it is, you know, a later cultural development.

36:59 Jonathan: He talks about education being its own end. There's not a separate end to education. The end of education is to prepare you to continue to learn and grow. So even though he's talking a lot about the infant and the child in this chapter, I think he's really making the case that a proper education system means you never lose this desire to learn and grow. And if you look at his critique of traditional education, he had harsh things to say about progressive forms that didn't take into account a lot of his idea. But his main critique was. His harshest critique was traditional education is that it squeezes that out of a kid. By the time they get to high school, they've learned to hate learning or not appreciate it. And that's what he's so good at advocating against.

37:42 Wes: Well, he makes a lot of plastic. That's one of the things he praises about the immature or the infant, which is, again, it's not like being wax. It's an ability to retain something from experience that will let you solve new problems later on. So what you're being imbued with are powers are active things that form the basis of new activities. And one of the, you know, the most important being the power to. The way he puts it, the power to develop dispositions so that this kind of goes towards what he'll do later on in the chapter where growth is the sort of endpoint of education. Education has no other end. But our growth is its own endpoint. And education is its own endpoint. We're not simply doing it for the sake of all our different practical, worldly ends. Its ultimate justification is just to continue to preserve and develop our capacity. Capacity to learn.

38:44 Jonathan: To learn and grow.

38:45 Mark: And I like this continued. I want to say biological. It's really more ecological talk of how it's not just growing by yourself, that it's an interaction with the environment. Back to that initial image that he gives at the beginning of the whole book about the environment is buffeting you with things. And if you're a growing organism, I mean, eventually we all give up and just let ourselves be buffeted and we die. Ideally, we are taking in nourishment of all sorts and converting that and using that to grow.

39:15 Jonathan: Interesting point. Yeah. Because we can, even before we die, we have the sort of ingenuity and resource. We can minimize the experiences we have so that they are only familiar experiences that we become habituated to. We know how to handle them. And then there is no more growth and we've lost whatever it is we had as a child. Either was squeezed out of us in school school, or we've decided, you know, I'm done growing. In that case, that would mean an education system that produces people who think that way has failed. Because the education system's purpose is to create beings who will continue while everyone has to continue to interact with the environment, but will want to interact with the environment in ways that are novel and constructive and will continue the process of growth throughout the life.

40:05 Wes: This brings us back to the chapter where he makes the distinction between habits in the pejorative sense and habits in the more positive sense. So what he calls fixed habits, you know, you get into ruts and routine ways and you lose originality and you lose open mindedness. We associate the word habit with bad habits and so on. But the way to solve that is to add intelligence or intellect. So the intellectual element, he says, will give you that plasticity back. Instead of basically allowing habits to reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, you develop habits that are dispositions to act in new ways as necessary to be creative or to problem solve, to do reflective thinking, all that stuff which is the opposite of simply just following into

40:56 Jonathan: mindless routine or really dangerous sort of cognitive habits. I mean, even getting back to to we talked about earlier about politics and lack of critical or reflective thinking about some of the most important issues of the day. I mean, we can just as easily fall into habits of a priori thinking, descending into tribalism or authoritative thinking of worshiping at the feet of the leader or tenacious thinking where we're going to burn it all down even though we don't know what it is. Right? So it's just as easy to develop really crappy dangerous habits as it is to form good ones.

In fact, it's probably easier. So in a way do his advocating. But even the sort of hundred years of educators who have focused on critical thinking since then have advocated on like look, there's a set of tools that are easily available, they take some time to get good at. But the really hard thing is those dispositions that you want to be able to do them, you want to critique something even that you would rather just believe. Believe at face value, or you would believe because some authority figure says it's a good thing and it's the authority figure you like or voted for.

So I think there's a lot packed in here.

42:11 Wes: You have to care more for the true than for the good. You have to think that the true, in a way, is prior to the good. Which is to say, one of the things that puts us into an unreflective state of mind is morality. This goes back to the Nietzsche critique is when we moral, that makes us passionate about a certain position. Such and such is right, such and such is wrong. And the idea of doing any truth seeking, doing any investigation in that context seems itself immoral. That's a bad habit that we actually have to get over. If we want to be thinkers in political and ethical contexts, we have to believe that those sorts of questions actually can be investigated.

Investigated, even if it means entertaining ethically atrocious opinions for the sake of evaluating them, not not holding them, but even if it means, you know, thinking about them rather than just saying, that's horrible, that's sacrilegious, that's taboo, whatever, and not thinking about it at all.

43:10 Dylan: Doesn't this get back to the point of cultivating the right level of doubt about the beliefs that you have?

43:16 Wes: Yeah, Mill. And being fallible.

43:19 Mark: I'm not sure I'm happy with Dewey's picking out the intellectual element as the distinguishing thing that breaks up habits. We just had this discussion about Merleau-Ponty and people influenced by him talking about hesitation, arguing against the same thing Dewey is arguing against. In other words, sedimented habits keep us from evaluating things in ideally the way we should. How do we break that? And following Merleau-Ponty, the idea idea was you hesitate and you kind of open yourself up in a way that maybe you would not have otherwise. You know, if just falling through the habit to what the universe has to tell you, you know, that's not a very complete explanation.

But to interpret that as the intellectual element, in other words, stopping and questioning things, that might be an overly intellectual way of putting it compared to the rest of what I see in Dewey. I think, see, Dewey is very much in accord with this Merleau-Ponty thing, but not in this one instance. Is he really just saying, you have to stop and pull out your critical thinking skills and apply it to any given situation and that's the thing that's going to defuse? Or is there something, maybe it seems like Dewey would want to like Nietzsche acknowledge the limitations of our ability, you know, sort of what reason can do on its own and allow some sort of more a broader or different kind of openness, a pre intellectual openness.

44:42 Jonathan: Don't forget the things he refuses to valorize is one unifying thing or virtue that stands above all else. You know, he's very cognizant of the role of emotion and instinct and all those things that play alongside intellect. In fact, I think he would say that intellect is made up of those things or knowings about the experiences you have. And the experience you have is about knowledge, just all the things that make up you, your intellect, your emotions and other non-cognitive factors. But it's all those things interacting with the same package of others in society and then the environment itself. So I think he's probably more open than most certainly somebody who would prize the intellect because his claim to sort of pre exist all experience.

45:29 Dylan: And I also would point to his emphasis on environment and the importance of environment in shaping and affecting our habits as being very in line with what we talked about with Merleau Ponty and even hesitation in that he uses the word intelligence, which maybe I'm, you know, splitting hairs to say something that is distinct from intellect versus intelligence, but he says habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting or degenerate into ways of action to which we are enslaved. Just in the degree in which intelligence is disconnected. I partly want to read that going back to the notion of reflection, we are cognizant about our environments.

We are cognizant about the habits that we are developing in the sense that we are cultivating doubt about them. And part of that I agree with Mark. He's not explicit, at least in what we've read here in the kind of way that the Merleau Ponty that we read in the discussion of hesitation involving changing your environment.

Environment.

But it seems to me there would be a resonant conversation about that with them.

46:33 Jonathan: Yeah, I wouldn't get too hung up on the word intellect. We've written for as many decades as he's did and as much the words become sometimes a little bit loose. I think Richard Rorty loves Dewey, but sort of criticized him for how the term experience, which plays such a big role in this book, has sort of can change between different projects that Dewey is working on. So it's fundamentally probably more than if you think about the other philosophers who've engaged with education going back to Plato and Aristotle, but also obviously Rousseau and Kant had quite a bit to say.

But I think Dewey is one who is sort of going into it without a sense of sort of separation. So much of what he talks about is the integration of mind with body, integration of self with society. You may not buy into that vision, but if you do, you'll see a completely kind of coherent vision for where that leads educationally.

47:31 Mark: And does that line up? Wes brought up in our recent rhetoric discussion just the difference between autonomy and heteronomy and what we were just saying about sediment and habits make you their slave. That's entirely what Wes was talking about heteronomy being. And so the question is, what will give you autonomy? Is the intellect and enough to get you autonomy? Is valuing the truth above the good enough. There's a certain disembodied quality that, you know, entering a realm of pure intellect seems to give you. That seems to give you an autonomy. And maybe this is kind of what Plato and Aristotle, or at least Plato, are pushing us towards, is using reason to detach ourselves from our animal nature. But that's so just entirely not Dewey's whole project.

48:15 Jonathan: It's not pragmatic. You know, I just have to keep remembering, you know, along with James and Peirce, he was a pragmatist. And so much of his work is sort of understandable in that context. Which is interesting because educators who. For whom Dewey continues rightly to be a hero, many of them have sort of lost the thread of going back to James and Peirce about what's a sort of pragmatic philosophy means and why his ideas grow from. From that. As you also kind of point out in that last chapter, I don't know if people read Philosophy Education. Dewey is. I'm not sure he's the first person to point this out, but it certainly resonated that one of the reasons it's hard to come up with an explicit philosophy of education is that may just be what philosophy is, that you can't

49:01 Mark: define it, that it is the epitome of intellectual growth. Say a little more what you mean before I start reading things into it.

49:09 Jonathan: I think when he talked about philosophy of education, I think it's in chapter 24, essentially, he was saying that he didn't bring up these examples. But if you think about if Socrates had an avocation or had a vocation, it would probably be teacher people who work in education now, and they're part of the academy. Right. The educative role of philosophy has been kind of clear since the beginning, since Socrates, and I think Dewey would make the case. Well, he did, yeah.

49:37 Wes: This is page three. Hundred sixty five. So if. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education.

49:52 Jonathan: And that gets back even to his sort of conception of what's the point of philosophy. I think for him it is very practical. He almost has a Hellenistic approach. It is to solve problems. It is to. Is to become wise and lead people to wisdom. You know, I think in this chapter he also talks about the philosopher being the person who can sort of translate and adjudicate between people with differences. So it's very. There's very much a practical role that philosophy can and should play in society, I think, is what he's advocating.

50:26 Mark: Right after where west stopped, he continues, unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic or verbal or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct so very practical and the

50:42 Jonathan: mission of a certain podcast. I know.

50:45 Mark: Well, I don't know. We've sometimes argued that. Again, I'm kind of thinking back to our St. John's or Peter Canelo's discussion of, you know, it's just come up in various times that maybe some of what Dewey even is arguing here, it's kind of a strange paradox that on the one hand, you want philosophy to give you patience with not settling into action, right? Because you want to be able to entertain doubt and continue to entertain doubt, even with these questions that are basically insoluble. But at the same time, there is something in that contemplation of the insoluble. That itself or that program, that state of mind that lets you do that is an eminently practical state of mind. Wes, you're usually the one who's like, people are always pushing philosophy to be so practical, practical. But I like it as contemplation in itself.

51:33 Wes: See, I knew you were trying to bait me. Well, you were just saying that you're treating this ability to maintain a state of doubt as eminently practical. I mean, the classic conflict for skepticism comes about, and it applies to, you know, we mentioned John Stuart Mill and on Liberty and the concept of fallibility. So the idea is that there are times when we need to act. There are things that are just too early, urgent for us to truly remain skeptical about. So with our ancient skepticism episode, I think we, you know, we talked about Pyrrhonian skepticism and the idea that you could be in a state of doubt about Everything except still do the things that you needed to do for daily living.

In Mill, we talked about, you know, one of the big objections to Mill's position on free speech infallibility is that, look, some things are. So if your life is being threatened, if it's a matter of survival, and this is the kind of thing people will say now about speech. Speech is violence. It's just. It's too urgent a thing to allow it to happen. And in Mill's time, it was about religion or the state will be destroyed or the moral fabric of society will be destroyed. So that's the conflict between action that's urgent and necessary and a more reflective state of mind where we put aside the need for action so that we can.

Can be truth seekers. Those things are intention. And that's a conflict that takes a lot that we could have a long discussion about.

53:00 Mark: Right. And I think likewise, you could probably have a Deweyan debate between does truth win or does the good win? I mean, probably he's gonna deny that those are actually separable.

53:09 Jonathan: Right.

53:10 Mark: He's exactly the kind of thinker that, you know, that would try to synthesize these things. And that's one of those distinctions that. Like form and content and stuff that doesn't actually.

53:20 Dylan: I mean, it sounds to me like you want to purge these kinds of thinking out of the moral character that can be so blinding. When you say you subjugate the good to the true, you, to me are pointing to the blinding power of moralism that is on the side of the good.

53:40 Wes: Yeah. So take, for example, critical theory. The whole idea of critical theory is that there are ethical issues that are so urgent that when we become thinkers, when we become philosophers, we tailor our thinking to the solution to those problems. So someone like Adorno, for instance, where our thinking is guided by not just our epistemic commitments, not just our commitments to what we think are good guidelines for truth seeking and inquiry, but by our social commitments, by what we think social justice means and requires of us. And if you think that the good, in a sense is prior to the truth, you have no problem with that.

You're willing to indulge the idea that truth is not a more fundamental idea than one's actual ethical and social commitments that it can in a way be bendable in relation to that. So the contrary idea is that we don't ever really know what's good except in relation to our truth seeking, so that the truth is prior, and that that means I have to be willing to be in states of doubt or Puzzlement and be willing to inquire about things which at a visceral level, I just want to say, no, that's not up for debate. That's just wrong. And why would you ever ask me to do any reflection about that?

It's horrible that you would even ask me. That's normalizing to suggest that that's up for debate. So that's just a sketch of the kind of conflict I'm thinking about.

55:15 Jonathan: Yeah. And maybe I'm naive, but it strikes me that those are the very matters that sort of critical thinking, reflective thinking, philosophy is there for, not to lead you to paralysis. So you're not actually engaging with a fight against evil. But it seems like the problems we're having now is not that we're thinking too much about our problems and not doing anything about it, is that we're sort of acting first, thinking later, if ever.

55:46 Mark: Can we just kind of have a round of closings? Whoever wants to say anything else, I

55:51 Wes: would just say, yeah, Dewey is great. I agree with you guys. I always enjoy. He's so clear. It's not that he's. I mean, syntactically he can be. He's a very good writer. Although I think syntactically, some people will probably find the way he's phrasing things complicated. But there's a. There's just kind of a pristine clarity to the way he expresses himself. I actually thought of our Camus episode because of the way the Plague starts, where he's basically talking about a town in which everything has become habitual. Right. Everything has just become this routine, passionless process.

And in a way, the plague is just a metaphor for. For that ordinary life just takes over. And what's interesting about that is that what Dewey reveals is that the habitual, the same grounds, autonomy and heteronomy, or freedom and unfreedom, are in a way grounded in the same thing. Which is habit. Right. It just depends upon what sort of habit it is.

56:51 Mark: I mean, I just want to interpret the habits that he wants are. Habits of openness are. Are habits that are, in the ordinary sense, non habitual.

57:02 Wes: They're self transcending. Which is what makes me think of existentialism as well. Right.

57:06 Mark: That's a good way of putting it.

57:07 Wes: Camus kind of on that track.

57:08 Mark: This is great. And I want to read more Dewey soon. I want to read his book on art. I do think that from what I recall of the later book that we read by him, Experience and Nature was just so much harder than this. You know, that 1520 years after this, maybe his way of stating things had gotten more convoluted. The worst I could say for this is having listened the whole book. Democracy and Education is available as an audiobook. And I listened to not the whole thing, but a lot of the other chapters, and it just seems like he just adds so little in each chapter. It's clear and he's building, but it really could have been cut down.

57:44 Wes: Yeah, I agree. I. I agree with that.

57:46 Mark: I don't know that you'd need to read whole books. I think our selection was very nice, and it was good that Jonathan suggested this chapter 24 from the end, which kind of sums up some of the overall moves in the book that I really would not have been aware of. Just reading the stuff about human nature and habit and growth. Thank you, Jonathan, for getting us to do this.

58:05 Jonathan: Oh, it was a pleasure. Yeah.

58:06 Dylan: Yeah.

58:06 Jonathan: And I'd say, you know, the only thing I would cause reading at this time, you know, around. I was much more attuned to the philosophical origins. You know, I kind of work with a lot of people that worship Dewey as an educator and sort of rightly so. And when I last read the book, it was in that context of primarily education. So it was the first time I kind of read it very closely with this sort of notion of what's the sort of philosophical grounding. And so I guess one hope is those out there, and there's many people who are extremely fond of Dewey, can use that education to explore him as a pragmatic philosopher. I found it much more enlightening, really, reading it with that in mind. Yeah. But thanks all you guys. This was a treat and a pleasure and the highlight of my Covid season just doing this with you guys.

58:56 Wes: Yeah, thanks for coming on. It was great.

58:57 Dylan: Yeah, it was great having you on, John.

58:59 Mark: I can, as a last thing, recommend for people. Also, How We Think by John Dewey is available as a podcast, as an audiobook. But the podcast that it is, if you look it up, the podcast is called Boring Books for Bed. And somebody reads pretty much exactly our selection, our chapter one, but it's over. All this, like, ambient music to help you drift off. I just thought it was funny that I was, like, out walking the dog using this audiobook in a way that it was not intended.

59:30 Jonathan: It's the mystery science theater, 3,000 of those philosophy books.

59:37 Mark: All right, hey, next time we are going to talk about Simone Weil, we're going to read a chunk of the need for Roots and some other stuff to get the exact reading selection so you can read along with us. Go look up the partially examined life on Twitter and we will give constant updates or, you know, regular updates of what we're reading at any given week. Our closing song is Too Far To Turn around by Jim Peterik in his band the Ides of March, I thought had the theme of lifelong learning, continual change in accord with this episode. You can hear my interview with Jim on Nakedly Examined Music episode 120 26@nakedlyexaminingmusic.com thanks everybody and good night.

1:00:14 Wes: Good night.

1:00:14 Dylan: Good night.

1:00:15 Seth: Good night.

1:00:26 Dylan: My reflection in the window Is someone who I'm just about to meet. I've seen the miles I've left behind the clouds of dust I've stirred up on the street. Don't wanna waste another moment look back and wonder where the time went can't take these the brink of a ride is calling out my name I'm on the road to where I've never been beyond the borders of imagining this story is my life I own the movie rights this passport is my fate but the shoes I I went tonight I am wide awake But I am dreaming Stumbling as my first step hits the ground But I've come too far to turn around I got to take it all the way now it's tempting to fall back upon the cushions that I laid beneath your head there. But where's the challenge of the future when you're laying there in bed. I can no longer cheat my passion

1:02:11 Mark: it's time to put this plan in

1:02:14 Dylan: hey I'm on the road to where I've never been beyond the borders of imagining the story is my life I own the movie rights this passport is my fate the shoes I wear tonight I am a wide awake But I am dreaming me this freedom that I found But I've come too far to turn around I gotta take it all the way Now. I can no longer cheat my passion it's time to put this plan in

1:03:24 Jonathan: action

1:03:27 Dylan: I'm on the road to where

1:03:29 Jonathan: I never

1:03:32 Dylan: be on the abundance of imagining this story is mine I own the movie right this passport is my fate the shoes I wear tonight I am wide awake But I am dreaming I don't know who I am or where I'm found But I I've come to find the turn around I gotta take it all away Now. I'm on the road to where I never been. Beyond the borders of the imagine I am on the road I am on the road.