Democracy and Education, by John Dewey

Preconceptions: None. Looks dry, which may be harmful enough.

Reaction: Should education be solely for the enhancement of the individual, or solely for the enhancement of society?

John Dewey suggested in 1916 that the answer should be both, and chances are the education you've received in the meantime bears the marks of his influence--both good and bad.

In a much better book, John Taylor Gatto points out that the education "system" is largely the result of an industrialized society. To cultivate a pool of useful workers, educators determined the best means to train people to sit quietly, follow directions, and do small menial tasks over and over again.

Gatto points to the disconnectedness of education, to the random starts and stops of class periods, to the oversimplifications and compromises taught in our schools as the hallmarks of a process designed to make better workers and consumers instead of more passionate and resourceful people.

Dewey might have helped.

This book contains a revolutionary (for the time, at least) program for straddling the line between individual improvement and practical/vocational instruction, between the personal and the public. Dewey's sympathies seem to be more along the lines of the public, and he considers most liberal education to be for the exploitative leisure class. He hopes to rationalize the personal into the public, making the aim of an individual to be the improvement of a society.

Since society is theoretically footing the bill for the education, that makes some sense. Also, from a practical standpoint, every participant in education must ultimately connect with society in some fashion, and education might as well ease the process.

Still, the notion of education as a form of social engineering disturbs me. That is the idea that inspires schools to eliminate "non-essential" arts classes from the curriculum. It is also the attitude that turned my liberal arts education into a random mash of confusion and contradiction--all the better to keep me from forming any ideas of my own. It is also the notion that makes schools into disturbing arenas of socialization by which many are drained of their individuality.

Few of the talented people I know believe their education was anything more than a clumsy attempt to shove them into a cultural container as it rumbled down a factory conveyor belt.

How unfortunate that the most perceptive critique of education probably comes from Pink Floyd.

I've written elsewhere that I am convinced our society is ill-suited to the truly creative, perceptive, and intelligent. Our educational system is a chamber of horrors to any person with drive, curiosity, hope, or spirit. I wonder, though, if that is the very nature of anything designed for mass consumption. Perhaps the only hope for the talented is self-education.

Verdict: It's hard to estimate how harmful this book really was--my education was partly the result of it, and that fact introduces biases I can't isolate and remove.

In other words, I have no idea why my education sucked, but I suspect this book may indeed have had something to do with it.

My public education from the age of about ten until graduation from high school was almost entirely worthless. My successful personal education resulted from reading and exploring on my own. This fact both proves and disproves Dewey's hypothesis.

• On the one hand, the isolated, context-less facts shotgunned at me by traditional teaching methods rarely stuck, and their total lack of connection made them difficult to weave into my consciousness.
• On the other hand, the warm and fuzzy let's-all-learn-how-to-learn-together didn't help me, either. There are times when you simply need to know certain facts.

Probably the best practice for education is some combination of methods, a union between useful facts and useful methods, between discipline and passion.

Of course, the pendulum swing between one philosophy and another continues unabated in our public debate, and only the lucky and the perceptive will successfully integrate the two into a true education.

Oscar Wilde said that nothing worth knowing can be taught. Fortunately, it can be learned--usually by escaping the social-minded people doing the teaching.

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