Abstract
Whether it is Karl Marx writing about the alienation of workers from meaningful labor or the American psychologist Carol Dweck writing about social-cognitive motivation, the general phenomenon of human engagement with life has fascinated minds in every age.2 Like many ideas in social philosophy and the social sciences, involvement with life has been explored under different names, always incompletely, and often without recognizing earlier contributions.
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.
—John Dewey1
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Notes
John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 49.
On alienation, see Richard Schacht, The Future of Alienation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Carol S. Dweck, “Motivational Processes Affecting Learning,” American Psychologist 41 (1986): 1040–1048.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1958).
Select works: William James, ed., Robert D. Richardson, The Heart of William James (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Stephen Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001)
James Garrison, Dewey and Eros (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997)
Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy, John Dewey and the Challenge of Classroom Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).
David Kolb makes the same point in Experiential Learning (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984).
Peter S. Hlebowitsh, Radical Curriculum Theory Reconsidered: A Historical Approach (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993). In addition to Dewey’s endorsement of the scientific method and experimentation in education, Garrison comments on the intuitive, humanistic spirit of inquiry in Dewey’s thinking in Dewey and Eros .
Jackson Kytle, “An Education Up Close and Personal,” in Progressive Education for the Nineties and Beyond , ed. Wilfred Hamlin (Plainfield, VT: Goddard College, 1993).
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), 13. (Emphasis added.)
For two applications of this idea, see Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
Laurent Daloz, Effective Teaching and Mentoring (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986).
Attributed to Tim Pitkin. For more on Goddard and Pitkin, see Ann Benson and Frank Adams, To Know for Real (Adamant, VT: Adamant Press, 1987)
Wilfred Hamlin, ed., Progressive Education for the Nineties and Beyond (Plainfield, VT: Goddard College, 1993).
Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 91–94.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1968), 114.
For a comparable account of peak experience interpreted in religious terms, sometimes called the experience of the numinous, see Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). We return to this topic in part II.
Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1993).
Abraham Maslow, “Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation,” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 3 (1955): 14.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), xi.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 28, 29, and 2.
Ellen Langer, Mindfulness (Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley, 1998), 57.
See Ellen Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning (Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 63–64.
In Langer’s most recent book, Counterclockwise , she makes no reference to the philosophy or practice of progressive education even though many of her insights and findings are relevant. Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
See William Kahn, “The Psychological Condition of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work,” Academy of Management Journal 33, no. 4 (1990): 692–724 and “To Be Fully There: Psychological Presence at Work,” Human Relations 45, no. 4 (1992): 321–345. It would be interesting to apply the Tavistock concepts he uses to explain how students learn and express themselves inside the formal role of student.
Charles Guignon and Dirk Pereboom are less convinced than I am about the implicit morality of existentialism. They note the argument that existentialism is a privileged discourse of the Western elite who focus on personal authenticity more than social justice. Charles Guignon and Dirk Pereboom, eds., Existentialism: Basic Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1995), xxxvi–xxxvii. While there is no explicit morality, social motives are important in Heidegger’s theory, Nietzsche’s protests on behalf of everyman, Camus’s books, and Greene’s request to be awake in the world. That Heidegger once belonged to the Nazi party and that Nietzsche expressed anti-Semitic views complicates our evaluation of their theories and lives.
Blaise Pascal, Thoughts . Trans. W. F. Trotter. (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1910), 78. Also cited in William Barrett, What is Existentialism? (New York: Gross Press, 1964), 77.
Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942).
Edmund O’Sullivan, Amish Morrell, and Mary Ann O’Connor discuss spiritual issues at length in Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning (New York: Palgrave, 2002). For an example of a self-help approach to restoring a close relationship with life, see Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 279.
Maxine Greene, Teacher as Stranger (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1973).
Albert Camus, Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays , ed. Philip Thody (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 342. (Emphasis added.).
Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 37.
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979)
Paul L. Wachtel, The Poverty of Affluence (New York: Free Press, 1983)
Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985)
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985)
Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self (New York: BasicBooks, 1991)
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2000).
See the anarchist text of Situationist activist Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977).
For a broad collection of articles, see Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981).
Quotes from Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom , 2–3. Also, see Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995)
William Ayers and Janet Miller, eds., A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).
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© 2012 Jackson Kytle
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Kytle, J. (2012). Perspectives on Engaged Living. In: To Want to Learn. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973818_3
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