John Dewey’s Paradise and Our ‘Pair of Dice’
When you look at your high school yearbook, you surely aren’t thinking about John Dewey. If it wasn’t for him and the movement he encouraged, it is likely you wouldn’t have had one.
John Dewey was a man of big ideas. He also had a big heart. He had a vision of what America could become for its people. It was a big idea, based on you. In this dream, you are thoughtful and good and powerful and agreeable. This would have been encouraged by education above all, a supportive environment generally.
He concerned himself with three aspects of life that you might be surprised to learn with respect to big-time scholarship: Routine, emotion, and habit. This was not celebrated by many of his fellow scholars, some of whom thought that considering routine seriously was to open a door to sanctioned mindlessness. This was what we might call a “Mr. Magoo Syndrome”, a kind of stumbling through life unaware of and disengaged from the kinds of changing conditions that present themselves.
Dewey didn’t see it this way. He saw these factors in an environment of constant learning with the object to program new ‘go-to’ moves that you (that is, the collective we) will automatically turn to when under pressure.
Impulses are the pivots on which the re-organization of activities turn[s], they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality. Consequently, whenever we are concerned with understanding social transition and flux or with projects for reform, personal and collective, our study must to analysis of native tendencies [i.e. impulses]. John Dewey
These make sense. The routine in which you spend your life engages in a slow dance with your emotions. Habit either dooms the two or bails you out — gives you an out. John Dewey was one of the main supporters for universal education, not just for the people most suited to it, with conditions that favor it, but for all, especially the people on the edges and in the corners of society. There was a social aspect to this, one that has in many ways succeeded. Of course, it hasn’t wholly succeeded as to social cohesion as it might have seemed to happen in the last few decades. Outside of the hot spots, we may well find that there is more equanimity in the worlds of school and work than appears to be the case.
The American experiment in this manner did not emerge because it was obvious that universal education was even a good idea. In the West and in the East, educational systems were highly exclusive. If you were not born to a wealthy family with the resources and standing to get you educated, there was no possible way you could get past rudimentary skills in words or numbers and you had no prospect for advancement. In Dewey’s thinking, the unschooled are doomed to the routine, the emotions, and the habits of outsiders to the kernel of society, the primary enjoyment of and advancement in life. Hidden in the minutiae of school is entrainment that prepares you for the opportunities that Dewey hoped would be available to because you were ready for them. This is described very aptly by none other than Aristotle:
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. Aristotle
Ah, the joy of shop class! For that matter, band class and workouts in the gym. Sitting through lectures and working out exercises in mathematics and the other subjects introduce you to new routines. They get your plate spinning, They get the ball rolling. The idea of Dewey and the other public education pioneers is that you would be able to take this momentum and carry them on through your life.
Is it enough, though, to reprogram your less cultivated impulses? Will thoughtful, schooled behavior become your go-to move? In the case of most of us, we could rather ask, did these become your go-to moves? To put a competitive turn on this, think of you competing in basketball with Larry Bird, that great NBA overachiever of all time.
His monumental memory and discernment represent in this case the realities that you will face. What are your chances? He knows your strong side and your weak side and will shut you down if you are not similarly ready and resilient. Can you assimilate information as it comes to you? Can you adapt? Can you reflect on these and make use of what you learn?
It isn’t just facts. It isn’t just socializing and assimilating — although these are wonderful aspects of public education, even when awkward and confusing things happen. It is in learning to learn, in thinking about thinking and thinking about learning.
I was once in a graduate course with senior educators. They were expressing concerns that this kind of education and preparation was not happening in an alarming number of cases. They were similarly vexed because many students were getting lost in a gulf between school, work, and the challenges of adult life. Habits and skills and emotions generated in school were not, in the estimation of those educational leaders, translating into similar habits and skills and emotions in meaningful, rewarding work.
I mentioned in that group a phenomenon that I called “de-education”, which I had observed time after time in work settings high and low. This was an observed set of actions, often by leadership at work, to pull new recruits off the orbits they had gained in their educational pursuits. Using terms like, “you need to learn how we do things here” and “you need to get off your ivory tower,” these forces look to undue much of what was done. Such “de-educators” would hire or otherwise socialize people that had run the gamut of Dewey’s momentum machine, but would take purposive steps to stop that momentum.
This resulted in this paper “Countering moral de-education in business” https://tinyurl.com/4v9ukszf, then a chapter in this book (Chapter 7: Process de-education and general-purpose “thuggery”)
The educators were clearly flummoxed by this. They asked me to write it up for presentation, but beyond that, they had no answer.
A good school, a good system would prepare students for such challenges. The question needs to be viewed from a more realistic and dimensional way that simply that if people are “taught” something, the knowledge in question is rooted and will be thus available for use ‘when the winds blow’. Much has to do with the wisdom and perspective of teachers, who hopefully can provide guidance and tools to their students to strategize about their thinking and doing, not just fall into whatever thinking and doing is already taking place. This is one area of criticism of Dewey’s triptych of routine, emotion, and habit. They say that it seems too passive, although he counters in this way:
It is a significant fact that in order to appreciate the peculiar place of habit in activity we have to betake ourselves of bad habits…. When we think of such bad habits, the union of habit with desire and with propulsive power is forced upon us…. [When we think of positive habits, we] think of them as passive tools waiting to be called into action from without. A bad habit suggests an inherent tendency to action and also a hold, command over us…. A habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of ourselves…. [Bad habits] teach us that all habits are affections, that all have projectile power, and that a predisposition formed by a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and fundamental part of ourselves than are vague, general, conscious choices. John Dewey
How do you take your education, use it, stay on the rails, and not be forced into some kind of whistleblower role when others do not? This is part of the education you need. How can you successfully argue against mindlessness? This is the kind of life we would seek.
There is a book that I recommend, “The greatest salesman in the world” by Og Mandino. The message is couched in a fun little story, and its is all about reprogramming habits:
Perhaps such a literary tidbit would serve to connect with your better self if you feel the need. Perhaps you have been de-educated, as I describe in the paper and in the book chapter.
The answer might also be found in reviewing those old yearbooks and in contemplating what you have learned, reconnecting with the old routines, emotions, and habits — and old friends with whom you shared such experiences. This detachment and listlessness that many feel, it comes from a lack of connections of this kind. Ancient advice holds that we all need to “endure to the end” (Matthew 24:13 King James Bible). I think this is routinely misinterpreted, implying that endurance represents an onerous thing, a transference of much of the the good life to perhaps another time. Rather, I think it refers to a hardening of our behaviors, an application of what we learn along the way. This has much to do with Dewey’s routines, emotions, and habits.
If you have the time and the inclination and the resources to do so, it might just be a good time to dive back into the breach. The older and more experienced you get, the more perspective you can gain from what you learn.
Reference: Cohen, M. D. 2008. Reading Dewey. In P. Adler (Ed.), 2008, The Oxford handbook of sociology and organization studies, classical foundations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 444–463.