In fact, I would contend that not only have progressive educators been social revolutionaries in their own right, but that John Dewey himself owes a yet-to-be-fully-acknowledged debt to Marxism that has produced a profound paradigmatic effect on educational theory and practice throughout this century.
The life of a great man is understood in the light of questions put about that life. It is my belief that a detailed examination of Dewey's relationship to Marxism can explain a great deal about the form and content of modern schools. For now, however, I would simply like to put forward the proposition that Dewey found Marxism useful, if not indispensable, in the formulation of his educational theories, and that most historians of education have not succeeded in telling us very much about the sources or consequences of his thought.
Marxist and work that does not.
http://www.stlawrenceinstitute.org/vol13brk.html
WAS DEWEY A MARXIST?
William Brooks
Dewey & Marx
To begin a cursory analysis of the thought of John Dewey and his relationship to Marxism, I would like to return to a consideration of his two early works on education, The Child and the Curriculumand The School and the Society. The former went through twenty-five separate printing runs by 1950, and as Leonard Carmichael pointed out in his introduction to the 1956 combined edition:
These two treatises were not prepared to be read in silent, closed studies by learned doctors. They were composed to be heard. They were written to be acted upon. They were intended not only to inform but also to persuade.
Like Marx, Dewey was never just an academician. He wished to influence the events and practices of his times, and he was happiest when he saw his ideas translated into action.
How can we better understand what John Dewey regarded as the guiding premises of his own life and work? How do we go about understanding this author as he understood himself? We probably learn most about a great writer by carefully reading what he wrote in the context of the time in which it was written. Dewey himself pointed out that he rejected traditional political philosophy. He said that it led to an empty "consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another" and away from what he considered to be "the facts of human activity." Dewey intended to develop a philosophy that would take in the broad field of human activity with which he was concerned. From the beginning, his philosophy was "politically programmatic." He addressed himself to social progress which he regarded as the only true objective of philosophy.
As I have already pointed out, the ideas of Karl Marx played a central role in the visions of social progress pursued by intellectuals in Dewey's era, and Dewey's own vision does not seem to have been an exception. Dewey certainly understood the essence of the Hegelian contradiction in the same way Marx did. Dewey's language appears to be inseparable from this particular premise of Marxist thought. The Child and the Curriculum begins with the discovery of an inherent contradiction in the educational process and its enunciation in dialectical terms. Dewey declared that:
Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented. They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem - a problem which is genuine just because the elements, taken as they stand, are conflicting. Any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment, contradict one another.
Throughout Dewey's work, the significant conflict in the educational process is between the child and the curriculum; between innocent potential and the accumulated culture of a flawed adult work; between the energy and the talent of the students and the structures of an archaic school system; between the "forces of production" that can move us forward and the "relations of production" that hold us back.
For John Dewey, the child and the curriculum were trapped in an unsuitable marriage that would require dissolution, then resolution through "reconstruction" and "growth." The traditional curriculum - laden with formal subjects, religion, and moral lessons - was designed to teach and inspire, but its fundamental irrelevance from the child's immediate, active experience, rendered its content uninspiring and unteachable. The idea of a child, not simply bored by inadequate instruction, but systematically separated from his studies by an inherent contradiction in the learning process is likely to have been derivative of Marxist dialectical analysis. The dialectical perspective led Dewey to describe the traditional education process as "contradictory" because he felt it was unfolding in a way that was both necessary to and destructive of the process itself.
The conflict between the child and Dewey's caricature of the traditional curriculum is a dramatic saga of tension and alienation. Dewey's children are alienated from school work by a contradiction existing between their real interests and those of the school. Like Marx's proletariat, they are caught up in a world conditioned by the interaction of opposing forces. The fundamental opposing factors in the process were "an immature undeveloped being" and "certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate in the mature experience of the adult." Specialized studies divided and fractured the child's world. Facts were abstracted and analyzed from different points of view or rearranged to suit principles outside the child's understanding. The ties of affection and "the connecting bonds of activity" were destroyed.
Dewey saw the schools of his day as intellectual battlefields between the forces of reaction and enlightenment. The former fixed their attention solely upon "the importance of the subject matter of the curriculum." They ignored the contents of the child's own experience. Their studies pretended to reveal a "great wide universe" with "fullness and complexity." But, the "teaching of external and general truths" only became an opiate for the educator and an obstacle to the real growth and development of the child.
Just as Marx had chosen the end product of the capitalist system, the commodity itself, to begin his analysis of capitalism, Dewey chose the child, the end product of the school, as the starting point of his analysis of education. From here he launched a revolutionary assault on unprogressive teachers. His legions inscribed on their banners:
The child is the starting point, the center, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard. To the growth of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject matter. Not knowledge or information, but self realization, is the goal.
The children had nothing to lose but the chains of the curriculum. Self realization was a worldly transcendence that would remake the child into a perfect model of the new socialist man.
Dewey's other early essay on education, The School and Society, continues in the same vein. Most chapters were designed to stand alone as lectures in education, so they tend to repeat and elaborate on familiar themes in Dewey's work. In a chapter on "The School and Social Progress," readers are reminded that the school is much more than a collection of individuals. Students should not enter simply to acquire knowledge as a businessman enters the marketplace to acquire profit. The progress of an individual can only be seen in relation to the needs of the community.
Dewey asserted that in the school "individualism and socialism are at one" and it was "especially necessary to take the broader view" over the narrow and acquisitive course. Like Marx, Dewey informed his readers that inevitable changes were forthcoming in the "modes of industry and commerce" and, again like Marx, Dewey was convinced that his predictions were based on scientific laws generated through the methods of dialectical materialism. Indeed, in one of his later works, Dewey was very forthright in declaring that "we are in for some kind of socialism, call it whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized, economic determinism is now a fact not a theory." In the light of his convictions, Dewey sought to conceive a new philosophy of education. Dewey's school would be intricately connected with the unfolding of materialist history or as Dewey put it "part and parcel of the whole social evolution."
The new school would become an instrument of dealienation. Dewey echoed the Marxist contention that the intimate connection between men and their occupations which had existed in preindustrial societies, had been lost in the capitalist mode of production. He alerted his readers to the concentration of industry and division of labour that "had practically eliminated household and neighbourhood occupations." The new mission of the school was to become a training ground for cooperative labour, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.
The "mere absorbing of facts," Dewey warned, was a selfish act in which he could see no redeeming value:
There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning; there is no clear social gain in success thereat.
Dewey was convinced that the introduction of manual training and the activity method would create a vigorous occupational spirit in the educational process. The school would affiliate itself with the life of the child and the community. It would become an embryonic socialist community. The new school communities would become incubators for peaceful social revolution. Dewey saw the new school providing a unique and irresistible example to capitalist society because its aim was "not the economic value of the product but the development of social power and insight." School, liberated from the religious influences -- which, like Marx, he regarded as medieval superstitions -- would demonstrate to all that it was neither God nor Providence but the earth and man's labour that were responsible for all progress.
Training in "social directions" would raise the child's consciousness and allow him to "locate the source of our economic evils." Evil was hidden in the structures of late capitalism, and, like Marx, Dewey saw a rewrite of history as the key tool of the exorcist. For Dewey, there were no grounds for including classical history in the curriculum, but:
Not so when history is considered as an account of the forces and forms of social life ... Whatever history may be for the scientific historian, for the educator, it must be an indirect sociology -- a study of society which lays bare its process of be-coming and its modes of organization.
Dewey's entire chapter on "The Aims of History in Elementary Education" recommends nothing less than a Marxist history for the new curriculum. If history was to become "dynamic" and "moving," its "economic and industrial aspects" had to be emphasized. This alone could prevent the tendency to "swamp history in myth, fairy story and merely literary renderings" of the bourgeois culture he sought to usher out.
Yet, John Dewey frequently denied his attraction to the ideas of Karl Marx and made much of what he declared to be Marx's fundamental error: the belief that a violent class struggle was a means toward social progress. In hindsight one has to wander whether or not Dewey's commitment to peaceful evolution, the "method of intelligence," and the concept of "growth," really put very much ideological distance between himself and Marxism. Dewey was not a Lenin. He did not work with a brutal edge honed by the memory of a martyred brother. But neither did Marx. In Sidney Hook's evaluation of Marx's contributions (Marx & the Marxists), he reminds us that although Marx was "sceptical of the likelihood that ruling social groups would peacefully surrender the reins of power,"he too saw room for progressive developments in certain states. Marx specifically indicated that given the existence of democratic traditions in countries like Great Britain and the United States, "the transition to socialism might be effected by peaceful and legal means."
Indeed, Professor Hook also pointed out that Marx concerned himself "only briefly with the strategy of the march to socialism." He believed the working class would come to power in different ways in different countries and his own revolutionary role was primarily catalytic. In summary, Hook asserted:
.. Marx conceived of his "party" neither as a conspiratorially organized underground army nor as a group intent upon imposing dictatorship over the proletariat, nor even as a special political party. Its function was primarily to exercise educational leadership
Dewey's own commitment to socialism through education was equally enthusiastic and quite above board.
The current education system arose from the needs of modern capitalism, which began to take its current form during the Gilded Age, the era after the Civil War. The Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s) emerged as a response to the excesses of capitalism, seeking to reform the system. On the other hand, anti-capitalist (socialist and anarchist) organizations that sought to mobilize the working class against the capitalists. It is in this context that John Dewey began to articulate the need for child-centered progressive education, which he argued should be based on students’ natural interests, be connected to production, and involve teamwork. Education should follow democratic principles in the classroom and thereby prepare students to participate in a democratic society. Progressive education, like the Progressive Era itself, emerged from the material conditions of capitalist society at the turn of the 20th century: the mechanization of production in factories that alienates laborers, and in schools alienates teachers and students.
Dewey fails to see that the modern education system is deeply connected to modern forms of alienated production. Students experience alienated learning in order to prepare them for alienated production. Thus, Dewey does not see that the primary enemy of child centered education is capitalism itself. Despite pointing to central problems within the system, both the progressive era and progressive education limited themselves to reforms within the confines of capitalist democracy, which were unable to stem the tide of corporatization.