John Dewey at 150: Reflections for A New Century Book

I recently read Durant's The Story of Philosophy. In that he said that it was a pity that philosophy had become quite so obsessed with epistemology (worrying about how we think) rather than ethics (worrying about how we can live a good life). Durant saw a time in the not too distant future when philosophy would get over epistemology and become once more a kind of thinking persons self-help club. In many ways this book is a version of 'how to live a good life' - no, better, how to educate people so that they are able to live a good life. A lot of it might have you hoping philosophy sticks with epistemology for a wee while yet.

Just about every time Jean-Jacques mentions women in this expect either that your blood will boil or run cold. That the smartest of men could say and believe the dumbest things is a constant source of amazement to me. On the good side, like Plato he believes girls need to be educated and to play an active role in society, but he also believes that women are meant for quite other things than men and that these separate roles are decided by nature and are therefore impossible to change.

Just about the only thing I knew about Rousseau prior to reading this was that he believed in the noble savage. That is, that it is society that is the cause of all corruption in the world and that humans in their natural state are pretty well wonderful to each other. So, it is reasonable to guess that he is going to also think that the proper way to educate people is to do so in accordance with natural principles of one kind or another. And this is his lasting influence, I think.

I've recently read Dewey's Democracy and Education, and I was surprised at how often Dewey referred to Rousseau and this book. I had also recently read The Social Animal, which is a bit of a homage to this book in many ways (expressly so). So, reading this was becoming increasingly important. To understand the ongoing importance of this book to education it might be best to start with what is the opposite view to Jean-Jacques. Remember how bored you were for so much of your time at school? Well, a lot of the reason for this was that you were being asked to remember stuff that you weren't really all that interested in. If it ever occurred to you to say to your teacher, "Look, enough of this shit already, I'm bored out of my bloody mind - can't you torture flies or something rather than torturing me?" Your teacher would just as likely say to you, "Now, listen you snotty-nosed little bastard, it is hard enough having to teach this crap to an empty-headed fool like you, but what you have got to realise is that although this stuff is as boring as bat-shit now, give it a couple of years and you've no idea just how important it will all turn out to be."

Education, in this model, is always something for some time in the future (a time that is always unspecified) and will help in ways that can't really be put into words right now. That kids buckle under and keep on 'learning' in a kind of half-sleep says much, much more about power relationships within classrooms than it does about anything else. (The 'anything else' here being 'what is important for kids to learn?' 'how is it best to teach them?' and 'what is it that they are actually learning when we force them to attend to this crap anyway?')

Rousseau makes this point beautifully when he is discussing what happens when you teach kids the catechism. When I was a child my family used to have a record of Brendan Grace doing a comedy routine about a priest asking a group of boys questions for their confirmation. Not being Catholic, there was always a sense of naughtiness in getting this insight into the happenings in that other world. One question was, "What is the mystery of the trinity?" And the boy who is asked replies, in an accent the priest cannot understand, "Three divine persons all in the one God." The priest says he doesn't understand and the boy says, "You're not supposed to understand, it's a mystery, isn't it?"

Rousseau says that if you want to see just how effective such teaching is, such rote learning despite the utter lack of understanding (or even a lack of an expectation of an understanding) on the part of the student - all one needs do is talk to the student about the subject outside of their learned (rehearsed) response. Once out of role not only do you see they have understood none of it at all, but also that their understanding is actually quite off from your intention. Why? Well, mostly because what they are being asked to 'learn' has no relevance or interest to them now. So, at best they remember disconnected pieces, rather than anything like a consistent whole.

Now, think about what we are teaching kids by teaching them this. We are teaching them that it isn't important for them to understand anything properly, but that they will get a pat on the back if they have been able to parrot back what appear to be meaningless jumbles of words in more or less the right order.

What the child understands doesn't really matter in the least, what matters is that they have their heads get filled with 'knowledge' that will make sense 'sometime'.

So, is there an alternative to this? Well, according to Rousseau there is - and that is to teach according to what the child is interested in learning and needs to know now. And if you want to teach the child something that they are currently not interested in learning, then it is up to you to find a way to make learning that thing essential for the child in the here and now. For example, he talks about getting his student lost in the woods so that he can teach the child the importance of knowing how to find directions from the position of the sun and therefore how the earth travels around the sun and how the sun shifts position in the sky according to the time of the year. The point is, as anyone with kids knows, kids live in the present. If that is the case, you really do need to teach them in the present too. When people see the point of something then learn is as easily as breathing. That is what we humans do - we are learning machines. But it is so easy to make it hard for kids to learn and to convince them they are not good learners. And the best way to achieve this is to try to force them to learn stuff they have no interest in or even any way of working out what possible interest they might have in it.

Now, all that is the good bit of this book. You have to know that this book was written for a very small group of people - that is, 'nice' people who are able to afford servants. This is about how to go about the education of boys, but not any boys, only a very few well off boys. It wouldn't take a lot to be turned off this book entirely. The long and rather boring discussion of religion, the sexism, the endless marriage preparations and the classism weren't really my cup of tea. All the same, the bits of this that are good are particularly good.