John Dewey has had a profound impact on Western education. His theories on the nature and purpose of education have shaped not only the American educational

Philosophical Inquiry in Education, Volume 28 (2021), No. 3, pp. 222-236

Was Dewey (Too) Modern? The Modern Faces of Dewey ILYA ZRUDLO McGill University

Although John Dewey continues to be a source to which scholars look in order to address contemporary social and educational issues, others have suggested that Dewey may be too implicated in the project of modernity to be acceptable in educational theory and practice today. To what extent Dewey was modern, and what we make of the question of his modernity, depends on our reading of Dewey and on our understanding of modernity more generally. I will argue that a broad reading of both Dewey and modernity helps us avoid treating Dewey either as education’s saviour or as inimical to our present purposes. First, I examine Dewey’s own conception of modernity and then broaden its scope by bringing into view four aspects of Western modernity: economic modernization, the struggle for justice, individualism, and naturalism. Second, I show how Dewey can and has been read as representing one or more of these aspects, but also from the perspective of one or more of these aspects. This generates what I will call Dewey’s four “faces”: Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist. This mapping offers a way of making more sense of the diverse readings of Dewey that exist in the secondary literature. Finally, I make a case for Dewey’s ongoing relevance because of his capacious view of the goods of modernity and his distinctively educational philosophy.

Scholars continue to read John Dewey as a source of inspiration for addressing contemporary social and educational issues (e.g., Stitzlein, 2019). However, David Waddington (2020) has recently suggested that Dewey may be too involved in the project of modernity to be acceptable in educational theory and practice today. The basic problem is familiar: there is a broad and growing consensus, particularly in educational studies, that there were and are major ethical, political, and epistemic problems with some of the frameworks for thought, feeling, and action that emerged in Western Europe over the past few centuries and gradually spread outwards. These frameworks generated (and continue to generate) immense suffering and injustice through, for example, colonialism and imperialism. They also in many cases legitimated (and continue to legitimate) the worst kinds of prejudices and the systematic destruction of the environment. In a word, the so-called Enlightenment had a dark side. Many scholars have dedicated and are dedicating their energies to surgically removing the influence of guilty modern ways of being and doing from educational theory and practice. This is an ongoing and significant project. Quite naturally, all this raises questions about Dewey: How implicated was Dewey in “the modern project”? Are we, say, perpetuating various forms of injustice associated with modernity by applying his ideas to education? Or can he help us overcome the modern injustices currently plaguing society? Given that Dewey is one of the most famous and influential philosophers of education (if seldom read comprehensively), these questions are significant for the field of education as a whole.

Of course, our judgement about “Dewey’s modernity” depends on how we read Dewey and what we understand by “modernity” more generally. In fact, there is a sense in which this question – particularly in its categorical formulation; that is, was Dewey modern or not – is driven by a narrow reading of Dewey and a superficial understanding of modernity. Over the course of this essay, I will show that a “broad reading” (i.e., a more comprehensive and just reading) of both Dewey and modernity helps us avoid treating Dewey either as the saviour of contemporary education or as inimical

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to our present purposes. There are genuine tensions in his work that derive in part from modernity, but we have much to learn about how he juggled these tensions – he is far from irrelevant to contemporary educational theory and practice. A second advantage of the kind of broad reading I am recommending here, which pays special attention to the complex theme of modernity, is that it can help make better sense of the diverse array of interpretations regarding Dewey that exist in the literature. This is in part1 because both Dewey’s cheerleaders and critics are for the most part also steeped in modernity, which colours their own readings of Dewey in certain ways. Carefully exploring the question of Dewey’s modernity, then, also offers an illuminating perspective on the landscape of the secondary literature.

To accomplish these aims, I first examine Dewey’s own conception of modernity, compare it with the sources Waddington uses, and then broaden the scope of discussion by drawing on Charles Taylor’s work (1989). This brings out four aspects of Western modernity: economic modernization, the struggle for justice, individualism, and naturalism. Second – and this part constitutes the bulk of my paper – I show that Dewey can and has been interpreted as “representing” one or more of these aspects, but that these aspects also constitute “lenses” through which Dewey has been read. This dynamic generates what I will call Dewey’s four “faces”: Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist. There are superficial versions of each of these faces (masks, as it were), but more sophisticated versions do tell us something important about Dewey, including his strengths and limitations – even if they are ultimately partial. A Deweyan attitude of reconstruction towards his own work naturally suggests itself. My mapping thus helps make sense of some of the tensions in Dewey’s work; but it also offers a way of organizing the incredible variety of interpretations of his legacy. Finally, I reinforce the case for Dewey’s ongoing relevance to educational theory and practice, with reference to his capacious view of the goods of modernity and his distinctively educational philosophy.

Dewey on Modernity and Broadening Modernity What did Dewey himself have to say about modernity? For Dewey, modernity was essentially related to the remarkable advances in methods in the natural sciences that had occurred in previous decades and centuries. The process of modernization implied extending those methods into all other areas of human life, including morality and philosophical reflection upon value. Modernity was therefore an unfinished project: “The genuinely modern has still to be brought into existence” (Dewey, 1948, p. 273). Philip Deen (2019) argues that Dewey’s theory of modernity is similar to Habermas’ in that both are hopeful that reason can be used to resolve the contradictions of modernity and improve the condition of the world. They are also both wary of crude instrumental reason serving capital, which they argue is one of the chief problems of the modern age.2 I want to retain from Dewey this notion that we are still in the modern period, which I think is convincing, and which Dewey and Habermas share with Charles Taylor (1989) and other theorists of modernity. Because he saw modernity as an unfinished process, Dewey thought that humanity was in a major period of transition (Fairfield, 2009, p. 261).

Now, Waddington (2020) labels Dewey a paradigmatic modern thinker. He does this by showing that Dewey’s thought matches with two influential accounts of modernity: one from Albert Borgmann (1992) and the other from Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984). For Borgmann (1992), modernity involves the domination of nature, methodological universalism, and ambiguous individualism. Waddington (2020)

1 Another reason for the staggering diversity of readings of Dewey is surely the sheer volume of Dewey’s corpus, which makes it relatively easy to find support for a vast range of interpretations. 2 There are of course important disanalogies between their thought, one of which is that Habermas follows a Kantian differentiation of reason into three domains (techno-scientific, moral-practical, and aesthetic), while Dewey holds a more undifferentiated but expansive conception of reason (Deen, 2019).

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finds Dewey particularly aligned with the two first elements of Borgmann’s conception of modernity: Dewey cited Bacon’s writings on the domination of nature approvingly and thought the scientific method should be applied to all affairs of human life (pp. 33–34). For Lyotard (1984), modernity has to do with two metanarratives: the right of all to scientific education for liberation and the belief in a unified system of knowledge. Again, Waddington (2020) finds aspects of Dewey’s thought that show his agreement with these two metanarratives (pp. 35–36). Dewey, then, Waddington concludes, is committed to the modern project.

I want to suggest that while Dewey’s own conception of modernity, as well as ones employed by Borgmann and Lyotard, offers certain insights, it is somewhat partial, and this obscures the debate about the relationship between Dewey and modernity. Charles Taylor’s (1989) work on modernity can help us here in two ways. First, it helps make sense of the somewhat confusing back and forth between pro- and anti-modernity positions. Second, it helps bring into focus a broader range of imperatives that drive Western modernity – some of which are absent from Dewey’s explicit writings about the nature of modernity, as well as from the writings of some “postmodernists.”

Taylor (1991) remarks that “Modernity has its boosters as well as its knockers” (p. 11). The “boosters” often have a nice, perhaps too-rosy picture of modernity in mind, while the “knockers” are fighting, not quite a strawman, but a somewhat debased version of modernity. Dewey can, in a sense, be seen as a kind of booster of one aspect of modernity – say, the advent of modern science. Borgmann and Lyotard, on the other hand, could be interpreted as knockers of one or more aspects of modernity, including some version of the aspect that Dewey has in mind.

Taylor also helps us keep a broader set of modern goods in view. Lyotard, for example, is clearly motivated by a very acute, modern sense of justice. Taylor would likely point out that his sense of justice has clear roots in modernity itself, and that his struggle for justice is in fact an essentially modern project. Modernity is not only about the advent of modern science, then; it is also about the struggle for justice. What complicates matters further is that some of the applications of modern science have led to massive injustices on an unprecedented scale. This is just one example of the contradictions that arise between two aspects of Western modernity. In fact, there are of course more than two major aspects. For the purposes of this essay, I want to distinguish between four aspects of Western modernity: economic modernization, the struggle for justice, Romantic individualism, and naturalism.

Briefly, economic modernization captures Borgmann’s reference to the domination of nature and to methodological universalism, but refers more broadly to a conception of the world that places economic activity and efficiency at its centre and is concerned with endowing individuals with the practical skill of problem-solving, among others. The struggle for justice refers to the emergence and promotion on a wide scale of a certain understanding of a family of concepts, such as liberty, equality, democracy, and justice, and of practices and institutions that are meant to embody them. Romantic individualism is concerned with the feelings of the individual, with their authentic freedom and self- expression. Finally, the sensibilities associated with naturalism involve a kind of reverence for nature, as the object of either Romantic or scientific piety and awe. There are no doubt other ways of dividing up Western modernity, and perhaps there are even other aspects, but already this four-fold picture gets us beyond the relatively narrow conceptions offered by Dewey and upon which Waddington relies.3

I want to suggest that these four aspects of Western modernity shape Dewey himself, as well as historical and contemporary readings of his work. Applying this four-fold picture to Dewey’s writings and to the secondary literature on him will help us get a better sense of the relationship between Dewey and modernity, and offer some insight into how we should approach him today.

3 I offer a similar four-fold account of Western modernity, but in more detail, in a forthcoming article in Educational Theory, entitled “A Transitional Conception of Modernity for Education.”

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Mapping Out the Different Faces of Dewey In his celebrated history of competing efforts to reform the American curriculum between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, Herbert Kliebard (2004) identifies four “interest groups”: the humanists, who were trying to retain some version of the traditional academic curriculum; the social efficiency group, who were concerned with making education more efficient and tailoring it to the workforce needs of society; the social reconstructionists, who emphasized the radical role of education in the transformation of society; and the child development reformers, who promoted a child-centred pedagogy. Kliebard’s interest groups resonate with the aspects of Western modernity that I distinguished above: economic modernization is related to the social efficiency group; social reconstruction could be seen as part of the broader struggle for justice; and Romantic individualism is clearly connected to the aims of the child development group. Kliebard would probably have included naturalism among the ideas associated with the child development group, but I have separated it out.4

Now, Dewey’s academic career spans almost the entirety of the 65-year period Kliebard (2004) reviews in his book (1893–1958; Dewey began writing in the 1880s and passed away in 1952). But where does he fit in this categorization of interest groups? In the preface to the first edition of his book, Kliebard mentions that he was initially “puzzled as to where [Dewey] belonged in the context of the interest groups” (p. xix). He eventually decided that Dewey “did not belong in any of them and that he should appear in the book as somehow hovering over the struggle rather than as belonging to any particular side” (ibid).

I agree with Kliebard that Dewey does not fit neatly into any of the four interest groups, which persist today under different guises. However, he is often taken to be a member of one or more of the latter three groups (social efficiency, social reconstruction, or child development). Those who take Dewey to fall into one or more of these three groups sometimes do so in order to bolster the efforts of those groups, with whom they themselves also identify. For example, a social reconstructionist might read Dewey as a social reconstructionist, recruiting Dewey to his team; such a reader would recommend Dewey to us as a solution to problems besetting modern education. Alternatively, educators may take Dewey to be a member of one of these groups as a way of blaming him (and the group in question) for the current (sorry) state of education. For instance, people have read Dewey as a mere promoter of social efficiency and thereby blame him (and others of his ilk) for current neoliberal trends in education; for these readers, Dewey is of no use to modern education and may even be harmful to read. We have, then, both boosters and knockers of Dewey – but they often have different Deweys in mind, and sometimes they have a rather superficial version of him in their sights.

My thesis here is that, while Dewey does not fit neatly into any of the three groups (or four aspects of Western modernity), his work reflects elements of each. Depending, then, on what features of Dewey’s work one focuses on, or what one assumes about modernity, one will see a different Dewey. I show below that there are four modern “faces” of Dewey – Dewey as engineer, Dewey as activist, Dewey as Romantic, and Dewey as naturalist – each of which offers some genuine insight into his position, but none of which is complete by itself. Dewey As Engineer Dewey wrote a great deal about the scientific method, about experimentation, and what he called the method of intelligence, and argued that we needed to extend these ways of being, doing, and knowing to other realms beyond science and industry, in order to increase “social control” (Dewey, 1916/2001, p. 38). Education, of course, should strengthen the ability of students to think, a process which was 4 David Labaree (2004) identifies “pedagogical naturalism” as one of the core elements of progressive, child- centred education (pp. 138–140).

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described in Dewey’s popular text How We Think (1910/1997). One of the ways in which schools could do this, he argued, was by means of teaching children through occupations: a kind of learning by doing. This would also help them better understand some of the profound industrial developments of modern society. On one occasion, he said that “We may fairly enough call educational practice a kind of social engineering” (Dewey, 1929, p. 39).5

This is one of the faces of Dewey: “Dewey as engineer.” It is, of course, a rather selective reading of Dewey, but it exists, and it has both boosters and knockers. Among the boosters, we have a number of early twentieth-century educators concerned with social efficiency, some of whom would later be labelled “administrative progressives” (Tyack, 1974). One of these was Paul Hanna, one of the founding members of the John Dewey Society, who produced a very successful series of social studies textbooks (Condliffe-Lagemann, 2002; Stallones, 2002; Tanner, 1991). It appears that Hanna’s textbooks replaced the more social reconstructionist–aligned texts that had been in circulation. Waddington (2020) describes Hanna as a “socially conservative” (p. 27) administrative progressive; a fan of Dewey, then, but one who seems to have selectively drawn on Dewey largely for his own purposes. John Rudolph (2005) has also shown how publishers of school science textbooks drew on How We Think, particularly Dewey’s famous list of steps in the process of thinking in order to illustrate the scientific method. Henry Cowles (2020) argues that these authors ended up largely simplifying Dewey’s account of thinking, reducing the scientific method to a linear series of steps.

Others share this reading of Dewey as engineer, but, instead of championing him, are critical of his work (the “knockers”). Eamonn Callan (1990), for example, has argued that Dewey may have been insufficiently (or intermittently) critical of corporate capitalism, since he “stressed the value of education in improving productivity and creating more discriminating consumers” (p. 89). In Callan’s view, due to ambiguities and tensions in Dewey’s own writings, it is quite legitimate to conclude that one of the main purposes of education for Dewey was to prepare an adaptable workforce by endowing students with qualities needed by corporations, such as initiative and industry. The focus Dewey placed on occupations, Callan suggested, was in part in order to foster some of these qualities of the adaptable employee. Waddington (2008), however, has disputed these claims. He has argued that Callan’s arguments rely on questionable textual evidence and that there are many indications that Dewey was not a partisan for corporate America. While there is some truth to Callan’s account, then, it may lack nuance.

Is “Dewey as engineer,” then, a myth? Are the boosters and knockers of this “face of Dewey” simply bad readers? “Dewey as engineer” is not, in fact, a myth, but more of a caricature. And, like any caricature, it emphasizes certain elements that can genuinely be found in the original. And some of these elements are good, while others are less desirable. With regard to the positive elements, one example can be found in Waddington’s discussion of Callan’s arguments. Waddington (2008) concedes Callan’s point that Dewey felt that students should develop qualities such as initiative and industry,

5 The context of this quote, which is pulled from The Sources of a Science of Education (1929), is a broader discussion of the relationship between education, as an art and science, to other sciences, such as psychology and sociology. Dewey is comparing education to engineering in the sense that engineering is also an art and science that draws from other sciences (physics, etc.) to refine its practice (e.g., to build better bridges). If one reads a little further, it becomes immediately clear that Dewey does not have a mechanistic conception of educational practice (or engineering) in mind; that is, he is sharply critical of formulaic recipes for educational practice. And yet, that Dewey unflinchingly used a term like “social engineering” to describe education makes it easy for selective readers to see this particular “face.” In “Education as Engineering” (1922a), he also compared education and engineering, but his focus here is the disanalogy between the two: namely, that engineering relies on well-established sciences, whereas education’s “source sciences” are at a much earlier stage of development. In this context, then, Dewey warns against approaching educational practice in the same way as engineers today approach their work. However, it is important to note that, even here, his concern is not with engineering per se – he has only praise for the art and science of bridge-building – but with the immature state of education and its source sciences, which means that treating it as a kind of engineering is premature.

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along with creativity and cooperation, all of which might be useful to employers, while pointing out that even if these qualities are compatible with corporate goals, this does not mean Dewey shared those goals (p. 61). I would add that those same qualities are in fact desirable aims of education – though not the only ones, of course. In fact, if education today is to help students address contemporary challenges (e.g., the environmental crisis), surely it needs to endow them with many of the qualities of a hard worker: diligence, perseverance, initiative, resourcefulness, etc. One needs these kinds of qualities to be a good worker, yes, but also to be good at nearly anything worthwhile. In this sense, we need Dewey the engineer.

On the negative side, while there is little to no evidence that Dewey was an uncritical supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, there is a more subtle form of materialism at work in his thought. The so- called London School philosophers of education – for example, R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst, etc. – were the most sensitive to this flaw in Dewey, though it must be said that some of them exaggerated this problem or dismissed Dewey too swiftly as a result. Their basic contention was that Dewey did not give objects of knowledge enough independent value and that, perhaps as a consequence of this, he over- emphasized method. While they acknowledged and agreed with many of his critiques of foundationalist epistemology, they worried that a purely pragmatic theory of knowledge did not contain the resources required to effectively help us understand how students and objects of knowledge might effectively interact. “The object must be left room to do its part” (p. 14), as Anthony Quinton (1977) put it in an essay on Dewey’s theory of knowledge.6 Regarding method more specifically, Hirst (1974) had the following to say: Dewey “considered the methods of enquiry found in science to be the foundation of all knowledge and thus wanted above all that pupils should master, not a subject, but the fundamentals of scientific method as he saw these” (p. 129). Hirst continued: “But if we take a wider view of what is to be learnt, even within science, we may well question whether the methodology of scientific discovery, assuming there is such a thing, should provide the bases of a general teaching method” (ibid).

More recently, Paul Fairfield (2009) has echoed the concerns of the London School, but in the context of a more charitable reading of Dewey. Fairfield points out that, especially later in his career, Dewey certainly emphasized the importance of educational content. It was not all about method for Dewey, though certain passages can certainly be read in this way. Nevertheless, Fairfield (2009) still perceives a lingering tendency in Dewey – perhaps especially in his early writings – to overemphasize scientific method in his account of experience (pp. 82–83) and to collapse all thinking into scientific thinking (pp. 134–136). In order to remedy these deficiencies, he suggests supplementing Dewey’s thinking with insights gleaned from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger. Fairfield thinks it a pity that these thinkers did not interact with one another, since he sees many affinities between pragmatism and phenomenology. Gadamer’s insights help broaden Dewey’s concept of experience, emphasizing the responsiveness side of it, while Heidegger helps us consider a more diverse range of ways of thinking, all valid, but some of which cannot be placed under the umbrella of experimental inquiry.

There is, then, a degree of truth in the portrayal of Dewey as “engineer.” And this face of Dewey’s comes with both strengths and weaknesses. But it is far from Dewey’s only face. Dewey As Activist The second face of Dewey is Dewey as activist. The organizing concept of his activism was, of course, his rather peculiar notion of democracy, which famously takes as its criteria the following two questions: “How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and

6 Paddy Walsh (1993) offers a version of this critique. He points out that if Dewey insists that objects of experience can have no value independent of ourselves, then “whence, in particular, the principle of impartiality that is implicit in is support for democracy?” (p. 109).

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free is the interplay with other forms of association?” (Dewey, 1916/2001, p. 87). For Dewey, social and political modernization was an ongoing process of democratization. In this sense, the democratic revolution was very much still a work in progress, which education should serve. He writes the following in 1937:

The end of democracy is a radical end. For it is an end that has not been adequately realized in any country at any time. It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural. A democratic liberalism that does not recognize these things in thought and action is not awake to its own meaning and to what that meaning demands. (Dewey, 1937/2021, p. 22)

The boosters of Dewey the activist find solutions to modern social and political problems in his writings. Robert Westbrook (1993), for example, charts Dewey’s increasingly participatory democratic ideas over the course of his life, and recommends this vision to contemporary thinkers. For Westbrook, Dewey is the American philosopher of participatory democracy. Though he cautions against “an uncritical or wholesale recovery of Dewey’s philosophy,” he concludes his book by stating that “we could do worse than to turn to John Dewey for a full measure of the wisdom we will need to work our way out of the wilderness of the present” (p. 552). More recently, Sarah Stitzlein (2019) has drawn on Dewey’s pragmatist conception of hope, arguing that it should be taught in schools in order to cultivate hopeful citizen-activists who can contribute to addressing the contemporary crisis of democracy. For these boosters, Dewey’s thought is immensely relevant to our struggles today to bring about a more just and democratic society.

As for the knockers, they exist along the entire political spectrum. Conservatives have long painted Dewey as a kind of radical socialist, or at least as an enemy of old-fashioned liberalism (Waddington, 2008, p. 51). Rawlsian liberals have also taken issue with him, arguing, for example, that his vision for democracy cannot be taught in public schools because it amounts to a comprehensive doctrine, and therefore teaching it would amount to coercion by suppressing reasonable pluralism (Aikin & Talisse, 2017, pp. 100–108).7 In a similar vein, Callan (1981) argues that Dewey’s philosophy of education is ultimately illiberal because he does not “adequately appreciate the value of human individuality” (p. 175). Further left, there are many who feel Dewey is not enough of an activist or cannot help us out of our current political crisis, because he is, for example, insufficiently attentive to vital social issues such as racism (e.g., Peters, 2020).

Again, these divergent readings of “Dewey as activist” tell us something about the readers themselves, while also revealing certain tensions in Dewey’s account – tensions that are deeply ingrained in Western modernity. The boosters of Dewey as activist tend to be attracted to his relative emphasis on the collective – that we need to learn to work together cooperatively and to deliberate with one another – and his concomitant condemnation of the “old” individualism – sometimes associated with corporate capitalism. Knockers, on the other hand, have worries about the character of the social unity that Dewey envisions. Does he mean unifo

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