Rekindling the Dialogue: Education According to Plato and Dewey

Public attention on education is increasingly focused on issues of performance and accountability. What kinds of educational experiences should American democracy value?

By Stephen R. Van Luchene

Democracy and Education

The Republic

Since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, thinking about America's schools has been taken over by something like philosopher René Descartes's malignant demon of doubt. The act's exclusive focus on assessing student achievement and faculty accountability in terms that can be "proved" mathematically has cast into doubt a valuable array of educational objectives. We used to instinctively recognize and treasure these objectives, even though they could never be described meaningfully in mathematical terms. In place of the rich diversity that characterized educational philosophy not so long ago, we find now that survival for public schools requires single-minded dedication to a limited set of learning objectives, mastery of which is taken to be established only by multiple choices on a standardized test.

Congress is now talking about pushing beyond the K-12 world to seek common measures of student performance that would apply to all colleges and universities regardless of the diversity of their missions.

Evidence of teaching excellence from kindergarten to university is increasingly confined to metaphors of the factory, the discount mall, and war. How many value-added units is the teacher-scholar producing? Are the customers getting what they pay for in education? Is America losing ground in the international academic achievement wars?

Lip service is paid to educational considerations beyond quantitative measures. The No Child legislation actually contains some broader interests, but the federal dollars tied to the tests, and the preoccupation they generate, leave little time and few resources for attention to anything else.

It is hard to imagine that as recently as a generation ago, a healthy dialogue went on between those who favored an "outcomes" approach to education and others who argued for broader and more diverse notions about the aims and efficacy of schools. With luck, we'll survive this dark episode and the pendulum will swing back toward greater pluralism in educational thinking. Without luck, we stand to lose the vitality of our educational system. To boot, we may also lose our democratic form of government, depending as it does on education to foster deliberation, judgment, imagination, and intelligence, and nurturing as it must a spirit of independence and individual responsibility. Where are we to look to rekindle the dialogue and pluralism that gave life to our multiform system of education?

Old books can be worth revisiting to help us see our own situation against the backdrop of time and wider experience. Two old books—actually one old and one ancient—that provide useful points of departure for this inquiry are John Dewey's Democracy and Education and Plato's Republic.

For the first half of the last century, John Dewey was dean of American educators. Among his many accomplishments, Dewey served as the first president of the AAUP. In Democracy and Education, his most comprehensive and enduring work in this field, first published in 1916, he addresses education from a range of perspectives. He argues for education based on experience, which becomes an interesting technical term in his thought. He explores the possibilities of folding liberal education into vocational training, and thereby establishing the specific preparation necessary for citizens in a democracy. His fervid interest in educational principles provides a refreshing antidote to the apparent unanimity that characterizes public talk about education today.

Dewey on Education

Some enemies of sound teaching practice looked much the same in Dewey's day as they look in ours. Addressing "learning by pouring in," he writes, "That education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory." He condemns merely mechanical teaching in all areas, and particularly in teaching reading: "The vocal organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will."

Many of his most memorable words address the importance of inquiry: "acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act of inquiring. . . . All thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everyone else in the world is sure of what he is still looking for."

Dewey had his own version of No Child, but his approach to evaluation was far from one-size-fits-all: "How one person's abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher's business. It is irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning." He warns us about arbitrary standards: "Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable, correct results. The zeal for 'answers' is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest."

He understood education as a process of natural growth: "Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried; processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked." He was deeply respectful of the individual learner: "In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations." He worried with good reason that achievement "comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achievement of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside."

He linked active learning with the highest aspirations of American democracy:

The individual who has a question which being really a question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for information that will help him cope with it, and who has at command an equipment which will permit these interests to take effect, is intellectually free. . . . His own purposes will direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming attention is docility, his memorizings and reproductions will partake of intellectual servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few in authority. It is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic.

Dewey and Philosophy

Dewey was a systematic thinker. It was of great importance to him that his thoughts on education should rest on a solid philosophical foundation. Whether we agree with his outcome or not, it is laudable that he makes a sustained effort to base his educational thought on serious attention to the broadest philosophical questions: What is man? What is mankind at its best? What sort of education is most in the interest of democratic society?

Democracy and Education shows Dewey's split relationship to Hegelian philosophy. Unlike Hegel, he did not envision human progress as reaching a state of full development; Dewey's own work, nevertheless, shows clear Hegelian influence in his approach to process and his conviction about progress. He was tremendously frustrated by the dead end that mainstream Western ontology and epistemology seemed to have reached by the close of the nineteenth century. Rather than let himself be drawn into what seemed a labyrinth without exit, he refused to address some of the troublesome philosophical questions and "settled" others by fiat.

For better or worse, however, the questions would not simply go away. They reemerged in odd corners of his thought. He saw the roots of the philosophical impasse in the mind-body dualism that began with Descartes in the seventeenth century. Dewey wanted to take life—in his terms, experience—whole and denied this dualism and a raft of others (individual-society, mind-subject matter). As a result, he worked himself into radical relativism, and put himself in the awkward position of arguing that nothing can exist outside a human context. Consequently, he had to step carefully around concepts like truth. He spoke of something being "settled, ordered, disposed of rationally" and carefully avoided the old vocabulary of philosophy.

Dewey exemplifies the American can-do spirit by caring more about action than about thought. Genuine education for him begins with questions about use and doing. He relegated contemplation, so highly treasured in the philosophical tradition, to the realm of the merely aesthetic, or worse: "There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve."

He was distinctly uncomfortable about leaving anything unresolved. His insistence on answers, no matter what the cost, was partly mitigated by his sense that all knowing is provisional; nothing is settled for all time. As for the relation of truth or knowledge to what's "settled," he wanted to use his version of scientific method as the litmus test for all cases. Democracy and Education shows the power and attractiveness of this attitude. At the same time, one can't help but notice the inadequacy—sometimes verging on the absurd—of Pro-crustean solutions to the more pesky questions about what's real and how we know.

What I like best about Dewey is that, while he consciously broke with the standard philosophical tradition, he nevertheless strove valiantly to weave the various branches of his thought into a consistent whole. Ideas about education cannot be properly worked out, in his view, without complementary work in the social, political, and philosophical domains.

The persistent philosophical questions emerged within Dewey's pragmatic framework, clothed in a new vocabulary and a new context of thought. Indeed, ferreting out what Dewey meant by "experience" provides one of the great pleasures in reading Democracy and Education. According to Dewey, life is experience and experience is education. The catch, however, and it is quite an interesting catch, is that experience and a host of other central concepts—mind, ends and means, purposes, meanings, ideas, the social, and the intellectual, to name a few—need to be rethought, redefined, and invented from scratch by Dewey to provide a suitable philosophical substructure for his work on education.

Reading Dewey, watching him engage honestly with the central questions of education, in both its philosophical and its practical dimensions, can greatly benefit college and university professors today. Dewey's insistence on action and answers suggests his partial paternity of present-day notions of accountability and achievement. On the other hand, his persistent, open-eyed probing of the relationship of education to our democratic structures and the larger questions makes him an excellent mentor. Reading Dewey may encourage us to take a more thoughtful and active hand in working out not only how we teach, but also how we lead our lives both as individuals and as integral members of our institutions.

Dewey's radical relativism, his insistence on the variability of human nature, and his convictions about human progress forced him to treat earlier thinkers as hopelessly limited by their historical context. He placed great importance on context and read Plato and Aristotle with some care. In fact, at many points he seems quite Aristotelian. His emphasis on starting with a student's personal and limited experience and moving toward the more highly principled "experience" of the disciplines is a close cousin to Aristotle's approach to learning.

Dewey's sense of his own place in history, however, compelled him to approach the Greeks as representing a primitive stage, both socially and philosophically. He read them without the open questioning he encouraged in readers of his own books. By doing so, ironically, he showed us why, although Dewey continues to deserve our attention, people will go on reading Plato's Republic when Democracy and Education has long fallen out of print.

Plato's Republic

Pairing Dewey and Plato in a review aimed at revitalizing thought about American education may seem odd. They genuinely differ on many important issues. Fundamentally, however, they're kindred spirits who spent their lives honestly pursuing the central issues of human existence.

Dewey accused "the Greeks"—often addressing a recognizable but unidentified text of Plato—of failing to appreciate the diversity of individuals. He condemned them for denying the principle of incremental progress, and for promoting a model of static reality. Moreover, he resented ancient Greek society for resting on "a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom."

Plato's main criticism of Dewey would probably be that he was too impatient for answers and too quick to cut off inquiry. Dewey began with the premise of democracy as the best form of government. Plato examined the entire range of governmental forms and the kinds of education appropriate to them, as well as the psychological, sociological, and philosophical issues that are necessarily intertwined with them.

As for encouraging active questioning as an approach to his texts, Plato had an advantage over Dewey in writing a dialogue, not a treatise. Characters in the Republic take up various positions that are enriched and complicated by their literary context. Even Socrates, the major character, and in many ways Plato's hero, does not simply mouth the convictions of Plato.

Plato invites us to walk along with him, or better, sit with him and silently hold up our part of the conversation, exploring, questioning, and often pushing it further than his mostly deferential interlocutors were willing, or perhaps able, to do. Often, Plato intentionally leaves an argument in a highly unsatisfactory condition to compel us to examine it more closely and work through to our own conclusions. Answers don't come easily in the Republic; we must work for everything of value we get from Plato. But as Dewey would say, predigested ideas are not very nourishing.

Socrates engages a rash and passionate young man, Thrasymachus, in the first book of the Republic over the issue of whether might is right. Although Socrates logically defeats him, both the other speakers involved, and we as readers, find that Socrates and Thrasymachus have not taken the issue as far as we hoped they would have.

In subsequent sections, Socrates proposes a relationship between the parts of the individual and the parts of the state. Is it appropriate to consider the state as an individual writ large? "State" and "republic"' both translate the Greek politea, which means more literally the governing setup of a small city-state.

Socrates builds up a "city in speech," which could also be translated as "thought" or "reason," a hypothetical city that begins with our mutual human need of one another. A version of education is explored that rests on a metaphor invented by the rulers to produce order in society: people naturally fall into three groups, gold, silver and iron, depending on whether they are dominated more by head, heart, or those organs below the diaphragm. This myth of the metals, limiting as it may be, is far richer than the mercantile metaphors for which American education currently settles.

Discussions of this city in the first five or so books are presented in a manner that, from a standpoint later in the book, seems superficial. A familiar Platonic problem emerges of trying to discuss the attributes of something (justice), before one has made a serious effort to discover what it is.

Near the middle of the work, the central images of the sun, the divided line, and the cave are presented artfully to avoid the very mistake a careless reading can produce—the misguided notion that Plato is laying down this ideal metaphysic as a "settled matter," in Dewey's terms. Rather, the doctrine of forms is imbedded in images. Images taken within the theory are several removes from truth. It remains arguable whether truth can or cannot be accessed through language, which itself is a system of images.

After probing the questions of what is real and how we know, the Republic reexamines education and shows that while it has practical uses, serious thought about teaching and learning must not stop short at the merely pragmatic. Plato preserves the mystery of what is and how we find ourselves in relation to it. He is patient with the deep questions he asks and never rushes us into premature conclusions. Some maintain that Plato has no interest in getting a reader beyond mere perplexity. My sense is that grappling alongside Plato with the questions may possibly lead to answers. But even if it does not, it surely engenders a healthy respect for the important sides of an issue. It allows us to see the richer shapes central questions can take if they are pursued and revisited without haste.

Here's where Plato and Dewey are most clearly allied. Dewey's principal tenet is that learning begins with a problem, the uneasy realization that what we know is not enough to get resolution. Plato's version of this is aporia, "perplexity," "an impasse," a place where you have to carry your canoe across shallow water. We might well take courage from both Dewey and Plato as we inquire into the kinds of educational experience that U.S. democracy should value. Such inquiry ought to be ongoing and active—the very antipode of letting the battlefield and marketplace be the commanders and CEOs of our defining educational myth.

Stephen Van Luchene is a tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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