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Know Your Enemy
Conservatives of America! Meet your enemy, John Dewey, and find out what he’s all about.
That’s just a short video from the Great Texts in Philosophy playlist on my YouTube channel, and the first of a series now airing on the The Philosophers in Their Own Words playlist.
Truth be told, I don’t actually think Dewey is the enemy. I think he’s an interesting philosopher who’s not always right. But I enjoy reading him when I can, and I agree with him on some things. You can keep an eye out in this series for reasons why your so-called enemy is not exactly a caricature of an arch-leftist–maybe even an ally from time to time. Here are some pointers on what he says:
- Education is how a society renews its life from one generation to the next. Education involves initiating the young’uns in the life of their society. In a democratic society, that means (among other things) equal participation in education.
- Education should involve a good bit of scientific training. But it should also involve some old ideas and old books as introductions to and training in the moral and intellectual life of the society’s past.
- Education should be active–not one where students passively absorb information, but one where young humans learn to use and channel their energy into creative and useful action. A good education doesn’t need Ritalin. (I think the failure of schools in the USA these days to harness the interests and energies of students would leave Dewey appalled and deeply upset.)
Here’s the first video from the Own Words playlist:
And here’s the second one: The video isn’t loading properly, but here’s the URL.
Expect one more each Monday for the next four weeks.
Published in Education
https://youtu.be/IMzg2NxX64A
Whaddya know? The video won’t load properly here either.
The architect of the Left’s effort to replace education with indoctrination.
The Left’s successful effort …
He’s the architect of something. But that isn’t what he wanted.
Is that the SOB that “organized” the library. What a crackpot!
Yes it is. A racist crackpot.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/553179-ivy-league-librarian-says-libraries-reinforce
Melvil Dewey came up with the Dewey Decimal System, not John.
I just watched the first two, and it all came flooding back.
Not the part about disliking Dewey. That part I remembered. It was the why that I forgot. Dewey keeps shooting at aphorism and hitting cliché. When he’s right, he isn’t profound, and when he’s profound, he isn’t right.
Anybody who designs and implements communications systems will tell you: you cannot transmit everything. If you don’t prioritize, you’ll fail to let the receiver know what they need to know. “Everything” takes more bandwidth than you have. Also, you don’t have to explain to people how to feel, but you had better let them know how to think. Critical thinking is not being taught, neither the critical part nor the thinking part. But the feeling? That they have down. Feeling and sharing those feelings. I’d “thank them for sharing,” except that would give them encouragement to continue doing so, and I’d really rather they would stop.
“Word problems are too hard.”
“Suck it up, Buttercup. Life is a word problem.”
Thank you.
Man, I was so conflicted.
Me too. I think someone once told me “wrong Dewey” but I never followed it up.
Maybe so. But I don’t know what to make of this without examples. First examples I know to look at is whatever I’m pretty sure I do understand, like the pointers in the opening post. If they’re right, I’m not sure whether they’re profound, but I’m happy to have them anyway. If they’re wrong, at least I know what views to consider as wrong. (But they do look right to me.)
I don’t think Dewey would disagree with that.
It is kind of built into the “civilization itself requires massive educational effort merely for its own maintenance.” You’d have to call Lincoln civilized (if anyone ever was) but his formal education famously was only about a year’s worth. The rest was accomplished by his own efforts, primarily by reading books. Dewey says that doesn’t work, but it can and has. Lincoln was hardly unique in that accomplishment, either. My grandfather’s education ended with the eighth grade. He studied on his own for a couple of years and sat for a state exam that awarded high school diplomas to those who did well enough. If your score was even higher than that, you got a teaching certificate too. So at 16, he became a schoolteacher.
Education needs a bit more Mortimer Adler, and a bit less John Dewey.
I’m not seeing how this connects to not teaching critical thinking (whatever that is), but I think this is a promising objection to Dewey!
Good for him! That’s great.
I dig.
One of my earliest posts was on that. The Star Trek graphic is still functional.
That was me rambling about how the current system is falling short. Teachers nowadays seem (to me) to be more focused on trying to teach moral sentiments than they ought. That is more a matter for home and church. They are on thin ice when they do that. It didn’t occur to me when I was at public school, but then it wasn’t as prevalent as it is now.
So now, Augie, thanks to you I have tabs open to Adler, Kant, and Kierkegaard. Also the Second Defenestration of Prague, but that is for the PiT.
Woo hoo!
How timely. I’m working (slowly) through a book arguing that Dewey left Progressives without a solid philosophical basis. They can’t get at the improvement of society except through the use of expert individuals, because they are metaphysical nominalists. If Dewey had followed Peirce’s pragmatism with Peirce’s realist position, instead of James’, it would allow a place in his political theory for communities as communities, and not as collections of individuals.
My interest is less in political theory than in what nominalism vs realism tells me about how (or if) a discipline of macroeconomics can be built from a microeconomic base.
That doesn’t seem like Dewey to me either. He’d want them to teach critical thinking and give students some head knowledge about the past–content of old books included.
(I think he’d also want group activities, which I don’t rank as a very high priority.)
I dig.
Sounds awesome.
My personal problem is that I don’t remember (or never knew) enough Pierce to keep track of all this.
My main professional concern is that there probably have not been enough progressives who actually understood Dewey’s philosophy to count them on one hand.
A secondary professional concern is that I’m not sure Dewey should be classified as a metaphysical nominalist. It seems like he’d be the first person to look at a distinction between something like “nominalism vs. realism” and shout “False dichotomy fallacy! We can have it both ways if we make a practical distinction.”
(Not that I’m at all sure what the distinction would be.)
Ok, so if the objection is that we don’t need a lot of formal education to teach the tradition, I think this Deweyish response might work:
–Either we’re talking about people like Lincoln and your grandfather who will take a little formal schooling and then go off and learn by themselves, or we’re talking about people who won’t.
–If it’s people who will, then we’re talking about people who have learned how to learn.
–If it’s people who won’t, then we still need some fairly significant formal education in history, civics, religion, philosophy, Shakespeare, etc. if there’s going to be any continuity in civilization from one generation to the next.
–So we need to either teach students how to learn, or give them some fairly significant formal education in history, civics, religion, philosophy, Shakespeare, etc.
And I think Dewey’s in favor of doing both of those things.
I think I do know where to start. If “realism” means reality is mind-independent and “nominalism” means not-realism, then this strategy might work:
–pull that nifty volume off my shelf,
–review what Dewey says about metaphysics in “The Practical Character of Reality,”
–take a sip of caffeine,
–ask myself what Dewey says about realism vs. nominalism,
–and see if I can answer myself.
The problem with Peirce is that he never was able to organize his thoughts long enough to put them in a book. One of my professors said that any claim that Peirce’s personal problems were due to him being bi-polar wouldn’t stand scrutiny because the sheer volume of his output suggests that he was stuck on manic. His published works add up to about 12,000 printed pages and his known unpublished manuscripts run to about 80,000 handwritten pages. But the topics include mathematics, mathematical logic, physics, geodesy, spectroscopy, and astronomy, psychology, anthropology, history, and economics.
@mackthemike, you wanna get in on this? Are you even still on Ricochet? Will this tag even work?
The definitions used in this case are that nominalism is the view that the only real things in the world are particular, individual things. And realism is the view that general classes of things may also be real. I may be butchering the terminology. But for my purposes, the nominalism position is that two economic agents are exchanging fish for coconut. The agents are particular people, Crusoe and Friday, and the coconuts and fish are the particular items in each persons baskets. The realist position is that there is a market where people come together and exchange a class of things called “fish” and another class of things called “coconuts” apart from any specific people or fish or coconuts. I’m probably well beyond what I know, at this point.
Oh, jolly good! That’s excellent terminology. Realism and nominalism on universals specifically.
(Now that I think of it, although “realism” is sometimes used to refer to the idea that reality is mind-independent, I’m not sure “nominalism” usually accompanies it there.)
Right. Well. If we’re talking about that, I guess I’d try more or less the same method! I’m just not sure which Dewey text to start with!
I suppose that’s a valid take on Dewey but I never viewed him as the true “enemy”. After Sputnik 1, this country went on a crash program of education (the National Defense Education Act among other things) which resulted in a pretty decent system of education.
Then, after the 60s, the education “establishment” proceeded to tear that system down, brick by brick. I suppose they might have used Dewey as their philosophical beacon but the destruction of our education system wasn’t inevitable.
Dewey, Cheetham & Howe.
Okay, I watched Chapter 7.
His “social” fetish is pronounced. Some of us are introverts. When people with a “new and exciting” plan to fix society show up, we mainly want to be left alone. I don’t remember his ever worrying about the rights of the minority.
He does care about the individual. That comes up eventually.
But I’m not at all opposed to saying he’s too far towards the social/communal side, too far from the individual side of things.
We know now that not everyone has the same learning style. Some people do better with individual study than they do with groups. His socially oriented schools will allow such people to fall through the cracks.