Criticism of Existing Education
Dewey: Criticism of Existing Education
What Dewey thought needed reform
Existing education needed new standards. Educators had to set new standards for education to be meaningful.
Education as preparation
- The common view is that education is preparation, a process of getting ready for the responsibilities and privileges of adult life.
- Dewey disagreed.
- He believed this notion brings evil consequences.
- The future is not an adequate motivator for children.
- Children live in the moment. They cannot be expected to prepare for the future.
Education as unfolding
Dewey criticised the common notion of development as the unfolding of latent powers, rather than as continuous growth.
Training of faculties
- The older view treated education as exercise or practice of the faculties of mind until they became thoroughly established habits.
- Dewey believed there are no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained.
Dewey did not just propose a positive account of education; he attacked the existing accounts directly. The article works through his three main criticisms: the picture of education as preparation, the picture of education as unfolding, and the older faculty-training model. Each was widely held in his time. Each, Dewey argued, was wrong about something important. Replacing them was part of what the new pragmatist education had to do.
The reform agenda
Dewey opens the criticism with a general statement. The existing educational system of his time needed extensive criticism. For education to be meaningful, he argued, educators had to set new standards. The existing standards were producing schools that did not actually educate.
The reform agenda is general at first glance. Once the specific criticisms are worked through, it becomes more concrete. Dewey is not asking for surface adjustments to existing schools. He is asking for a different picture of what education is, what it is for, and how it works. The schools of his time were operating on inherited pictures that he believed were fundamentally wrong.
The three pictures he attacks in this article are the three most influential in the educational practice of his America: education as preparation for adult life, education as the unfolding of latent powers, and education as the training of mental faculties. Each had its defenders and its institutional embodiment. Each, Dewey thought, was producing schools that failed at the very work they claimed to be doing.
It needed extensive criticism and new standards before education could be meaningful
The schools of his time were operating on inherited pictures of education that Dewey believed were fundamentally wrong: education as preparation, education as unfolding, and education as the training of faculties. Each picture had defenders and institutional embodiment. Each, Dewey argued, was producing schools that failed at the work they claimed to be doing. Replacing the pictures was part of what the new pragmatist education had to do.
Against education as preparation
The first picture Dewey attacks is the one most readers can identify with. Education is commonly viewed as a process of preparation: getting children ready for the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. The school years are the preparation period; adult life is what they prepare for. School is justified by the future it produces.
Dewey disagrees. He believes this notion brings evil consequences. The word evil is strong and is meant to be. He is not saying the preparation view is mildly mistaken; he is saying it produces real damage.
The first damage is motivational. The future is not an adequate motivator for children. A child cannot be expected to work hard in the present for the sake of a future they cannot yet imagine. A six-year-old does not feel the pull of becoming a competent adult at twenty-five. A twelve-year-old does not feel the urgency of preparing for a career at thirty. The future the preparation model points to is too far away and too abstract to motivate the actual children sitting in the classroom.
The result is that schools built on the preparation model have to invent external motivators to drag students through the preparation. Grades, prizes, punishments, the threat of failure, the bribery of approval: all of these are workarounds for the absence of natural motivation. The school becomes a system of external pressures that the students endure rather than a place that engages their actual interests.
The deeper damage is that children live in the moment. They cannot be expected to prepare for a future. The Dewey alternative is that education must engage them now, in the present moment, with material that genuinely interests them. The engagement is what produces real learning. The fictional preparation produces only the appearance of learning, in the form of grades and credentials, while the actual development the school claims to be producing fails to happen.
A teacher today can test the criticism against their own classroom. If the only reason the students are doing the work is the future reward (grades, advancement, eventual jobs), the school is operating on the preparation model. If the students are engaged with the material itself, finding it interesting, doing the work because the work is worth doing, the school is operating closer to Dewey’s alternative. Most schools today do some of both. The Deweyan critique is that the preparation half does damage and the engagement half does the actual educational work.
Because the future is not an adequate motivator for children, and the model produces evil consequences
A child cannot be expected to work hard in the present for the sake of a future they cannot yet imagine. Schools built on the preparation model have to invent external motivators (grades, prizes, punishments) to drag students through the preparation. The school becomes a system of external pressures the students endure, rather than a place that engages their actual interests. Real learning requires engagement now, with material that genuinely interests them.
Against education as unfolding
The second picture Dewey attacks is more philosophical. The common view of his time, partly inherited from Rousseau and partly from the German romantic tradition, was that development was the unfolding of latent powers. The child contained, at birth, all the powers they would eventually develop, in latent form. Education’s job was to provide the conditions under which the latent powers could unfold into their full expression. The picture is of an acorn unfolding into an oak.
Dewey criticises this picture as well. The criticism is subtle. He does not reject the idea that children have natural tendencies or that education should respect them. The earlier articles have shown how seriously he takes the child’s actual development. What he rejects is the specific picture in which development is the unfolding of a pre-set programme.
The reason for the rejection is that the unfolding picture treats the adult as already implicit in the child. The work of education becomes the work of making explicit what was already there. There is nothing genuinely new in the process; the adult is just the developed form of what the child contained from the start.
Dewey replaces this with his own picture: development as continuous growth, with the direction set by the interaction of the child with their environment over time. The adult is not pre-contained in the child. The adult is the result of the developmental process, which itself depends on what the child encounters along the way. Different environments produce different adults from the same children. There is no fixed adult waiting to be unfolded.
The practical difference is significant. An unfolding educator waits for what is already there to come out. A Deweyan educator actively shapes the environment so that the developmental process produces good results, rather than just any results that the unfolding would have produced. The educator is not just a midwife to the pre-existing potential; they are a participant in determining what the developing person becomes.
Because it treats the adult as already implicit in the child, with nothing genuinely new in the process
The unfolding picture treats the adult as the developed form of what the child contained from the start. Development becomes the work of making explicit what was already there. Dewey replaces this with continuous growth, in which the direction is set by the interaction of the child with their environment. The adult is the result of the developmental process, which depends on what the child encounters. Different environments produce different adults from the same children.
Against the training of faculties
The third picture Dewey attacks was the older one and was still influential in his America. The faculty-training view treated the mind as a collection of distinct faculties (memory, judgement, reason, imagination, attention) each of which could be exercised separately. Education was understood as the exercise or practice of these faculties until they became thoroughly established habits.
The picture supported a particular kind of curriculum. Memory was exercised by memorisation of poetry, lists of facts, and dates. Reason was exercised by formal logic and abstract argument. Judgement was exercised by carefully designed exercises in evaluating claims. Each faculty had its appropriate drill, and the trained faculty would then be available for any future task. A student with a well-trained memory, on this view, could memorise anything; a student with a well-trained reason could reason about anything.
Dewey rejects the picture. There are no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. The mind is not a collection of separate faculties, each operating independently. The mind is a developing whole, and the development happens through interaction with specific objects of thought and experience.
The empirical case for Dewey’s rejection has only grown stronger since his time. Modern psychology has confirmed that there is no general memory faculty that improves equally for everything when trained on one type of content. Training memory for chess does not improve memory for poetry; training memory for poetry does not improve memory for chemistry. The same is true of reason, judgement, attention, and the other classical faculties. Each is in fact a collection of specific competences tied to specific domains, not a single general capacity that exercise can sharpen for use anywhere.
The practical implication is that a curriculum built on faculty training is doing less than its designers thought. The student who has been drilled in memorisation of poetry has improved at memorising poetry; they have not improved their general memory. The student who has been drilled in formal logic has improved at formal logic; they have not improved their general reasoning. The transfer that the faculty-training model assumed simply does not happen the way the model predicted.
Dewey’s alternative is to ground education in specific contents and problems that the student engages with for their own sake. The student learns about a particular subject by working on it, develops their habits of thinking through that work, and builds up over time a specific competence in that subject. There is no separate faculty being trained on the side. There is just the work, done well, producing the developmental result the work itself produces.
Because there are no general mental faculties waiting to be trained; the mind develops through specific work, not through generic exercise
The older view treated the mind as a collection of distinct faculties (memory, judgement, reason) that could be exercised separately. Modern psychology has confirmed Dewey’s rejection: training memory for chess does not improve memory for poetry, training reason in logic does not improve reasoning in chemistry. The mind develops through specific work on specific contents and problems, not through generic exercise of general capacities.
How was this article?