Abstract
While most Progressive Era advocates of educational professionalism argue that education is an objective science, John Dewey sees it as an art. The goal of Deweyan education, “growth,” is not just a concept but a “quality.” The quality of growth can be analyzed into four interdependent constituent qualities—interest, purpose, meaning, and freedom—which should collectively shape four interdependent aspects of life: the structure of the self, the organization of society, the administration of the school, and, finally, aesthetic experience. Dewey’s account of the professional educators’ authority is thus inseparable from his descriptions of aesthetic experience and aesthetic education, and can be contrasted with similar accounts in classical Bildung, Maxine Greene, and Stanley Cavell.
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- 1.
Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15–18.
- 2.
For an analysis of how the tension between democracy and cultural hierarchy in Dewey’s thought influenced a literary contemporary, see Patrick Redding, “‘One must make a distinction, however’: Marianne Moore and Democratic Taste,” Twentieth Century Literature 58:2 (2012), 296–332.
- 3.
John Dewey, Art As Experience (New York: Perigee Books, [1934] 2005), 36, 13.
- 4.
John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Touchstone, [1938] 1997), 25, 36.
- 5.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1915] 2004), 36. Those who have charged Dewey with vagueness, of style or thought or both, include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who said “so methought God would have spoken had he been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was”; Richard Hofstadter, who writes that Dewey “wrote a prose of terrible vagueness and plasticity”; Martin Dworkin, for whom “his style was often opaque, his terminology ambiguous”; and Charles L. Glenn, who faults Dewey for rejecting Whitehead’s dictum that “a certain ruthless definiteness is essential in education.” Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), xiii; Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), 361; Martin Dworkin, ed., Dewey on Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 13; Charles L. Glenn, The American Model of State and School (New York: Continuum, 2002), 205.
- 6.
Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5, xiv.
- 7.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 286; Dewey, Democracy and Education, 174.
- 8.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 152.
- 9.
John Dewey, The Sources of a Science of Education (New York: H. Liveright, 1929), 13–14, 32; John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, [1939] 1989), 88–89, 26, 96, 98.
- 10.
Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 57–58, 74–76.
- 11.
Dewey, Experience and Education, 38.
- 12.
Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1981), p. 18; John Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Ann Arbor: Register Publishing Co., 1891), 99, 100.
- 13.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 12. Jonathan Levin explores this notion of the self arising from transactions with the world in his Poetics of Transition (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), stressing that the self’s openness to outside forces makes it subject to a “pervasive […] restlessness” (x). Stable identities and even concepts are decentered in favor of “alertness to possibilities of meaning as they lurk in the always dynamic margins of experience” (xii). As Levin acknowledges, though, for Dewey (unlike, say, Emerson ) these margins are valuable not in themselves, but as part of an ongoing dialectic with the central or habitual self; stability is just as important as change.
- 14.
John Dewey, Interest As Related to Will (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1895] 1899), 6–9, 13.
- 15.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 12, 220; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Cosimo Classics, [1920] 2008), 195.
- 16.
Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 209, 123, 132.
- 17.
Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 72, 74.
- 18.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 100–101; Dewey, Art as Experience, 259.
- 19.
John Dewey, “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will,” in National Herbart Society Supplement to the Yearbook for 1895 (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 1896), 5, 15, 20–21.
- 20.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 43, 63–80, 277, 293; John Dewey, Experience and Nature ([S.l.]: Read Books Ltd, [1925] 2017), 318. As Levin remarks in The Poetics of Transition, in pragmatist aesthetics art exists not to serve our interests but to transform them (67). What is missing from Levin’s view, though, is that art does not just turn some (old) interests into other (new) ones—rather, it refines our interests, making them more deeply and lastingly interesting.
- 21.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 238.
- 22.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 76–78.
- 23.
John Dewey, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 164; Dewey, “Interest as Related to Training of the Will,” 16–17; Dewey, How We Think, 19.
- 24.
Dewey, How We Think, 19.
- 25.
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Cosimo Classics, [1920] 2008), 177; Dewey, Democracy and Education, 77.
- 26.
Victor Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 47–48.
- 27.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, [1927] 1997), 211; Dewey, Democracy and Education, 26; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 209.
- 28.
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 209; Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 148; Dewey, Democracy and Education, 64, 75; John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, [1935] 2000), 61, 59.
- 29.
Jason Kosnoski, “Artful Discussion: John Dewey’s Classroom as a Model of Deliberative Association,” Political Theory 33, no. 5 (2005): 654–677, 657.
- 30.
Steven A. Fesmire, “Dramatic Rehearsal and the Moral Artist: A Deweyan Theory of Moral Understanding,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31, no. 3 (1995): 568–597, 588; Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 91.
- 31.
Dewey, Experience and Education, 56; John Dewey, School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum (Dover Publications, [1901] 2012), 81; Laurel Nan Tanner, Dewey’s Laboratory School: Lessons for Today (New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press, 1998), 47.
- 32.
Dewey, Experience and Education, 70–72.
- 33.
Dewey, How We Think, 219–221.
- 34.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 36, 41.
- 35.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 14; Dewey, Democracy and Education, 25.
- 36.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 14.
- 37.
Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Scribner, 1962), 5; Dewey, Art as Experience, 14.
- 38.
Dewey, Experience and Nature, 306; Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 263; Dewey, Art as Experience, 202.
- 39.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 15.
- 40.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 52, 131. The relation between meaning and purpose in Dewey’s philosophy is controversial, and perhaps we should pause to clarify where we stand. At issue, here, is whether Dewey’s is a philosophy for doers, taking an active posture to be paradigmatic, or whether contemplative, devotional, or receptive states play a more important role. Meaning is part of the apparatus, governed by purposiveness and reflective thought, that allows us to resolve well-defined “problematic situations” and realize specific “ends-in-view”; but is it merely that? If it were, then even the appreciative phase of meaning would have value only because it eventually helps us to achieve our chosen goals. Against this reading, which is taken for granted by Stanley Cavell, Kestenbaum argues that for Dewey meaning “outruns” purposes, for two related reasons. The first has to do with the background: when we face it, we encounter meanings that exceed our formulated purposes, and because the background is the matrix from which all thoughts arise, the meanings with which it is imbued must exist before, and after, the process of purpose formation. The second reason is the “primacy of meaning” thesis (discussed in the Introduction to this study). “Reflective experience,” which is the domain of purpose, always proceeds by simplifying and streamlining the embodied immediacy of “primary experience,” which is the domain of meaning. As the very term “primary experience” suggests, this relation is asymmetrical: primary experience comes first, analytically, in the human lifespan (we feel before we think), and in history (since Dewey believes that the life of hunter-gatherers has more immediacy than ours). Despite this asymmetry, though, in another sense the relation between primary and reflective experience is reciprocal. As Kestenbaum remarks, for Dewey, in deliberation, “the distinction between valuation and evaluation, the sensed and the reflected, the qualitative and the known, is blurred,” as “appreciations and appraisals test each other and are brought into accord.” “Principle must be fitted to the qualitative, the qualitative fitted to principle,” as we pursue our best selves. In theory, some meanings may be innocent of any entanglement with our definite thoughts. In practice, though, it is more accurate to say that while a meaning may be prior to some particular thought, our impression of what sort of thing we are looking at, as well as the tastes and values to which it appeals (or doesn’t), has been shaped by our earlier thinking. It is the “Reflex Arc” argument again: stimulus (perception, primary experience, meaning) is not just given from without, but is always shaped by our prior acts of response (thought, reflective experience, purpose). Thus, most of the time, experiences of meaning draw, to some extent, on purposive thought. However, far from elevating the active life over the contemplative or appreciative, this reading should lead us to see that each is enriched by the other. To repeat Dewey, though our relation to meaning cannot become completely “intellectualized,” yet “emotional appreciation of it is won only by those willing to think.” See Victor Kestenbaum, “Preface,” in John Dewey, Theory of the Moral Life, ed. Arnold Isenberg (New York: Irvington, 1996), xviii.
- 41.
Quoted in Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 95–96.
- 42.
Dewey, School and Society and the Child and the Curriculum, 54–55.
- 43.
Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 (New York: Atherton, [1936] 1966), 40; Dewey, School and Society and the Child and the Curriculum, 87.
- 44.
Dewey, Experience and Nature, 306; Dewey, Art as Experience, 201.
- 45.
Kestenbaum, Grace and Severity of the Ideal, 78, 87, 91.
- 46.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 278.
- 47.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 283, 253.
- 48.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 253.
- 49.
Dewey quoted in Scott R. Stroud, “Dewey on Art as Evocative Communication,” Education and Culture 23, no. 2 (2007): 6–26, 20; James quoted in Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 83.
- 50.
Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 5.
- 51.
Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 22.
- 52.
Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 23–24, 28; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 167; Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 216.
- 53.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 191; Dewey, Experience and Education, 44.
- 54.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 63–65.
- 55.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 89; Dewey, School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum, 40. Although these specific passages are not cited (to my knowledge), Dewey’s sense of the interdependence of personal and social freedom is central to his place in two important books by Ross Posnock on pragmatism and culture: The Trial of Curiosity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) and Color and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998). For Posnock pragmatism, in its Jamesian and Deweyan varieties, is a solvent of “identity logic,” unraveling exclusive social categories (such as race and nation) and promoting an ethos of interchange and curiosity. Dewey, for Posnock, is, unlike William James, a pragmatist who, instead of encouraging individuals to step back from social institutions in all their “bigness” and crudity, asks them to enter them and, when needed, to loosen them up.
- 56.
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 18–19.
- 57.
Mayhew and Edwards, Dewey School, 367; Herbert M. Kliebard, “Dewey and the Herbartians: The Genesis of a Theory of Curriculum,” Counterpoints 70 (1999): 68–81, 75.
- 58.
Kliebard, “Dewey and the Herbartians,” 18; Dewey, Democracy and Education, 26; Dewey, Art as Experience, 60.
- 59.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 16.
- 60.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 16, 258, 354.
- 61.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 357.
- 62.
Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain, 92.
- 63.
Nicholas M. Gaskill, “Experience and Signs: Towards a Pragmatist Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008): 165–183, 174.
- 64.
Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, 6.
- 65.
Fesmire, “Dramatic Rehearsal,” 569–581. John Beck’s book on Dewey and William Carlos Williams, Writing the Radical Center (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), is one of the few studies of Dewey’s literary influence to pursue this analogy between aesthetic form and the form of democratic community.
- 66.
Fesmire, “Dramatic Rehearsal,” 569–581.
- 67.
Kosnoski, “Artful Discussion,” 655, 665.
- 68.
Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 93–94.
- 69.
Maxine Greene, Teacher As Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973), 130.
- 70.
Victor Kestenbaum reported this remark to me in conversation.
- 71.
Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 23.
- 72.
Greene, Dialectic of Freedom, 20–21.
- 73.
Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1995), 4.
- 74.
Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 39; Greene, Teacher as Stranger, 269.
- 75.
Greene, Teacher as Stranger, 291.
- 76.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 125; Naoko Saito and Paul Standish, Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 7.
- 77.
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 124–125.
- 78.
Saito and Standish, Education of Grownups, 126.
- 79.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 52.
- 80.
Cavell, Claim of Reason, 123; Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 198.
- 81.
Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 191.
- 82.
Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26–27.
- 83.
Saito and Standish, Education of Grownups, 186–187.
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Raber, J. (2018). Living Has Its Own Intrinsic Quality: John Dewey’s Aesthetic Education. In: Progressivism's Aesthetic Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90044-5_5
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