Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

This chapter examines three historical approaches to education: the Platonic ideal, the Enlightenment-era individualistic approach rooted in classical Liberalism, and the 19th-century approach to education which focused on subordinating the individual to the newly emergent nation-state. Dewey also uses this chapter to compare the relationship between education in democratic and authoritarian states. This chapter features five sections.

1. The Implications of Human Association

First, Dewey examines the different meanings that the term “society” takes on. These are political, religious, industrial, and interest-based associations. It is important to “extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features” (63). Education is both formative and reflective of different societies. Despotic states feature an appeal to fear. A healthy society, in contrast, features a “diversity of stimulation” which translates into a “challenge to thought” (65). Dewey mentions the Platonic concept of a slave, which exist even where there is no formal slavery, “one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct” (65). It is important for a group not to get too closed off by limiting interactions with other groups and the flow of ideas. Some of Dewey’s assessments here are generalizations. For example, the Soviet Union, a 20th-century authoritarian state, featured significant rewards for excellent school performance, such as free university education, and later, social status.

2. The Democratic Ideal

Dewey considers democracy an optimal model for his education theory. Democracy fosters “greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control” (66). This form of government also translates into freer forms of interactions between different communities in a society. Indeed, Dewey considers democracy a “conjoint communicated experience” rather than strictly a form of government (66). Democracy helps consider the actions of others surpassing the “barriers of class, race, and national territory” (66). It is noteworthy that rather than focusing on the individual as the historical subject of liberal democracy, Dewey underscores the communal aspects of democracies.

3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy

Platonic philosophy suggests that “a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to others” (67). According to Plato, a functional society must know its purpose, otherwise its members are subject to accident. Education is linked to the legal system, traditions, as well as institutions of a given society. Therefore, the state must be just to offer proper education. Yet even without a just state, it is possible for philosophers to learn “the proper patterns of true existence” (68). The philosophers could then influence a ruler to use these patterns in state-building. Dewey points out the paradox of Plato’s recognition of the basics of education and the proper functioning of society, while the philosopher lived in a profoundly undemocratic world. After all, ancient Athens called itself a democracy. However, it had a strict class structure and subscribed to slavery.

4. The “Individualistic” Ideal of the Eighteenth Century (69)

Despite the Platonic influence on the Enlightenment philosophes like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, European thinkers of this period focused on the individual and the need to develop diverse individual skills. In a truly progressive society, it was the emancipated human that would “become the organ and agent” (70). Dewey argues that while the Enlightenment thinkers rightfully identified the limits of social classes, their desire for liberation translated into “a worship of nature” (70). It was this concept of nature and its links to science that the philosophes used to argue for a new social order. These thinkers perceived social institutions as limiting and outmoded and thus turned away from them.

5. Education as National and as Social (71)

In contrast, 19th-century pedagogues thought that excessive focus on nature contradicts the very concept of education with all its methodologies and organizations. Europe began to move in the direction of state-linked educational systems that were, in turn, linked to nationalist-minded politics. However, when the state took over the field of education, it “furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also its goal” (71). In practice, this state takeover meant that one of the goals of the school system was to supply “the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official” (71). In other words, education transformed from the pursuit of personal development to disciplinary training. Germany was one such example. In contrast, Immanuel Kant represented an “earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal” expressed in his text on Pedagogics (72). Dewey highlights broader problems with education within the nation-state: such education focuses on national loyalty rather than “superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends” and surpasses the nation-state (75). Therefore, Dewey arrives at the need for more universal values than the cultural specificity embedded in patriotic education. 

In “Aims in Education,” Dewey examines that very question starting by identifying what an aim is. He asserts that an aim is a decision that comes from within after it becomes conscious and intelligent. Having an aim also presupposes considering all the applicable alternatives. In this way, an authentic aim is “opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a process of action from without” (84). This chapter comprises three sections.

1. The Nature of an Aim

The purpose of education is “to enable individuals to continue their education” (76). The latter is only possible in a democratic society, according to Dewey (76). First, Dewey describes educational aims. He differentiates between ends and results. A result can be an effect (an “exhibition of energy”), such as the wind changing the position of grains in a field, but not an end (77). In contrast, the bees’ actions lead to an end because “they are true terminations” of what came before (77). One could also describe these as being akin to physical and chemical changes, respectively. Aims are always linked to results, which presupposes continuity. Aims also presuppose “an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completing of a process” (78). They are, therefore, directional. Acting with an aim in mind means taking intelligent actions focused on value and meaning.

2. The Criteria of Good Aims

Next, Dewey establishes the criterion for setting aims correctly. An aim “must be an outgrowth of existing conditions” in which the ends are not outside the given activities (79). There is no external authority to impose aims—only one’s own intelligence. When aims first arise, they must also be flexible to “represent a freeing of activities” (80). Setting aims should also consider “not the target but hitting the target” (81). Dewey differentiates between a static and dynamic character of an end. In the case of the former, that end is a “means to something else” (81). And end “which grows up within an activity as plan for its direction is aways both ends and means” rather than isolating the two (81).

3. Applications in Education

First, it is important to recognize that “education as such has no aims” because it is abstract—only the people involved in the process do (82). For educators, aims “mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements required in carrying on a function—whether farming or educating” (82). In other words, educators cannot establish their own aims without accounting for the conditions as well as the unique circumstances and needs of each student.

Aims must translate into methods involving “cooperating with the activities of those undergoing instruction” so as to “liberate and to organize their capacities” (83). In other words, learning must be student-focused and interactive with the environment. Dewey also warns of setting ends that are too general or final. Of course, specific activities have general ideas behind them and are linked to other things. Thus, what Dewey means by using “general” in the negative sense is abstraction disconnected from the specific context. Ultimately, “[w]hat a plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor” (84). Plurality improves the education process. 

Here, Dewey focuses on general aims as the vantage points for the “specific problems of education” (94). Of particular importance to education are three key factors: development in line with each student’s unique traits, social efficiency, and culture (or “personal mental enrichment”) (94). For Dewey, society continues to play an essential role in fostering the optimal type of education because it cultivates “the power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities” (95). The ninth chapter comprises three sections.

1. Nature as Supplying the Aim

Dewey reminds the reader that general aims are merely points of view rather than a finality. These points of view allow one to “survey the existing conditions” and then assess them (85). Dewey begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who asserted that “education is a process of development in accordance with nature” (86), in which the natural was the opposite of social. According to Rousseau, education came from things, men, and nature. The reason pedagogical reformers turned to nature was their frustration with the “artificiality of the scholastic methods” (85).

Dewey thinks Rousseau is correct in his desire to reform education. He argues that there are three key aspects of educational development. They are human biology and the activities for which human bodies are designed; the activities and their uses as they are influenced by others; and the direct relationship with the environment. Dewey believes that by turning to natural development as an aim, the French thinker was able to identify “the means of correcting many evils in current practices” (88). For example, the focus on nature is a focus on bodily health in general. Specifically, physical mobility is important. Finally, the focus on nature allows one to account for unique differences between children, for instance, by observing their natural tendencies. Of course, in the case of the Enlightenment thinkers, their turn to nature was not simply an idea, but “a political dogma” (90). They rebelled against the norms and institutions of their society.

2. Social Efficiency as Aim

Here, Dewey discusses a concept opposite to equating nature with the source of authentic education and society: with evil. This concept is about supplying “what nature fails to secure”—the “habituation of an individual to social control” (90). Simply put, this concept subordinates nature to society. In practice, social efficiency highlights “the importance of industrial competency” (91). This pragmatic approach to education suggests that people need a particular skill set to make a living to survive. However, at times higher education ignored and looked down upon this basic idea of earning a living. Of course, one cannot assume that economic conditions would remain unchanged. Dewey points out the fast pace of technological advancement at the time of writing. Indeed, the early 20th century was the end of the Second Industrial Revolution the developments of which ranged from improving urban infrastructure and transportation to designing sophisticated death machines like the U-boats, chemical weapons, and machine guns used during World War I.

A related concept is one of civil efficiency. Dewey returns to the importance of the environment and social interactions to argue that mental power does not exist in a vacuum but rather involves a relationship with others. Taken to its logical conclusion, “social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable” (92). Social efficiency can even erode class barriers empowering the “imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them” (92). In this context, Dewey returns to the question of authentic democracy in an indirect way.

3. Culture as Aim

Dewey defines culture as “something cultivated, something ripened,” which is “opposed to raw and crude” (93). Should nature be defined as having raw qualities, then culture opposes nature. Culture also opposes efficiency when efficiency is reduced to a “narrow range of acts” rather than the meaning of activities (93). Dewey links the opposition between “high worth of personality” and “social efficiency” to feudal, hierarchic societies. In contrast, in an ideal democracy, there should be an “opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be afforded all” (93).

Furthermore, efficiency as an aim should be linked to experience. This aim should not be reduced to external products because this approach makes it materialistic. Instead, this aim should include the less tangible value of experience per se. Dewey argues against opposition between the self-sacrifice to serve others and the pursuit of self-improvement which he compares to the dualism of the material and the spiritual, respectively.