Education and Democracy
Dewey: Education and Democracy
Dewey’s commitment
- Dewey was a strong proponent of democracy.
- His educational philosophy reflected democratic elements throughout the classroom.
- He was particularly concerned with strengthening democratic community in a nation in danger of losing its moral and spiritual compass.
Present, not future
- As Dewey believed children live in the present, not the future, he disagreed with the preparation model.
- Externally imposed aims emphasising a remote future render the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.
Embryonic societies
- Schools must act as mini or embryonic societies in which children grow into citizens of a democracy.
- The school is a society; the students are its citizens; the teachers are present to facilitate the process of democracy.
Factory system
The embryonic-society model was Dewey’s response to the factory system of education, which treated students as passive raw materials to be moulded by teachers.
Application of democratic principles in schools
- Schools must be freely available to all from kindergarten to college.
- Children carry on the educational process themselves, aided and guided by the teacher.
- Students are trained to behave cooperatively, sharing with and caring for one another.
Benefits
- Students develop into creative and well-adjusted citizens.
- The progressive influence radiating from schools stimulates and reinforces the building of a democratic order of free and equal citizens.
Dewey’s educational philosophy culminates in his account of the relationship between schools and democracy. A democratic society cannot survive if its citizens have not been formed by democratic schools. The article works through what a democratic school looks like in Dewey’s account, why the factory model fails, and how the principles of democracy translate into specific classroom practices.
Democracy as the underlying commitment
Dewey was a strong proponent of democracy throughout his life. His educational philosophy reflects democratic principles at every level. The classroom, the school, and the wider educational system were all places where democracy could either be practised and strengthened or undermined.
His commitment was not abstract. Dewey was particularly concerned with the enhancement of the democratic community in a nation that, he believed, was in danger of losing its moral and spiritual compass. He wrote at a time when American industrialisation was transforming the country, when waves of immigration were producing a more diverse population, when economic concentration was producing inequalities the older democratic forms had not been designed for. The democracy of the founding republic was, in his view, under genuine strain. The schools had a role to play in determining whether the strain would result in the renewal of democracy or in its replacement by something worse.
This is the political context Dewey’s educational philosophy answers to. A society that wants to remain democratic has to produce democratic citizens. The institution best placed to produce democratic citizens is the school. The school is therefore, for Dewey, an institution with a serious political mission. A school that takes democracy seriously can be the engine of democratic renewal. A school that does not, regardless of what its civics textbook says, is undermining the democracy it sits inside.
He saw American democracy as under genuine strain and the schools as the institution best placed to renew it
Industrialisation was transforming the country, immigration was producing a more diverse population, and economic concentration was producing inequalities the older democratic forms had not been designed for. The democracy of the founding republic was under strain. The schools had a role to play in determining whether the strain produced democratic renewal or replacement by something worse. A society that wants to remain democratic has to produce democratic citizens.
Present, not future
Dewey’s commitment to democracy combined with his earlier criticism of the preparation model to produce a specific claim. As children live in the present, not the future, he disagreed with the idea that education is preparation for a future to come. The criticism applied with special force to civic education.
A school that treats democratic citizenship as something the student will be ready for later, after the schooling is complete, is missing the point. By the time the student is officially an adult citizen, the patterns of citizenship are mostly formed. A student who has not practised democratic life during the school years cannot suddenly become a democratic citizen at eighteen. The practice has to start now, in the school, with the students who are present now.
Dewey wrote, in Democracy and Education, that the currency of externally imposed aims in education is responsible for the emphasis put on preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish. The damage is real on both sides. The teacher who is teaching for a remote future is going through motions whose immediate worth they cannot see. The student who is learning for a remote future is enduring lessons whose immediate worth they cannot feel. Both teacher and student become mechanical and slavish: they go through the work because they have to, not because it engages them now.
The democratic alternative is to make the school itself a democratic setting now. The students do democratic work, with all the freedoms and all the responsibilities that real democratic work involves, in the school setting in which they actually live. They are not being prepared to become citizens at some later date. They are practising citizenship in the present moment, in a smaller-scale democratic community.
Because children live in the present and the patterns of citizenship are formed during the school years themselves
A student who has not practised democratic life during the school years cannot suddenly become a democratic citizen at eighteen. The practice has to start in the school. Treating citizenship as something to be ready for later renders the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish, because the immediate worth of the work cannot be felt. The democratic alternative is to make the school itself a democratic setting now.
The school as an embryonic society
The famous Dewey image for the school is the embryonic society. Schools must act, he writes, as mini or embryonic societies in which children grow into the citizens of a democracy. The school is a society; the students are its citizens; the teachers are present in the school to facilitate the process of democracy.
The metaphor is doing real work. An embryonic society is not a model society. It is not a play-society or a pretend-society. It is a society in the technical biological sense: a small-scale, developing version of the larger thing it will become. The school is a real society, with real relations, real responsibilities, real consequences. The students live in this society for the years they are at the school. The society they live in shapes the citizens they become.
The role of the teacher in this picture is precise. The teacher is not the boss of the school society. The teacher is present to facilitate the process of democracy. They make sure the democratic processes happen, they help when help is needed, they intervene when the society is going off the rails. But the society belongs to the students. They are its citizens, not its raw material.
This is one of the places where Dewey diverges sharply from the older models. In the traditional school, the teacher is the authority and the students are the ones being shaped. In the Deweyan school, the teacher is a facilitator and the students are the agents. The shift is more than a tone change. It is a different account of who is doing what.
A modern teacher will recognise the language: classroom community, student voice, democratic decision-making in the classroom. These are all working out of the embryonic-society idea. The implementation is often partial; truly democratic classrooms are rarer than the language suggests. But the language itself traces back to Dewey, and the more serious applications are recognisable as practical Dewey at work.
A real small-scale developing society, not a play-society, in which children practise being citizens now
The school is a society in the technical biological sense: a small-scale developing version of the larger thing it will become. The students are its real citizens, with real responsibilities and real consequences. The teacher’s role is to facilitate the process of democracy, not to be the boss of the society. The society belongs to the students; they are its citizens, not raw material to be shaped.
Against the factory system
Dewey’s embryonic-society model was a direct response to the factory system of education that was prevalent at his time. The factory system treated students as relatively passive raw materials to be moulded by teachers. The school was an assembly line; the students were the products being shaped; the teachers were the workers doing the shaping; the curriculum was the manufacturing specification.
The picture is exact for many schools of Dewey’s America. Industrialisation had reshaped the country, and the school system that grew up alongside it had taken on the shape of the factory it sat next to. Children were sorted by age into batches. Each batch passed through a sequence of stations (subjects, grade levels) at a fixed pace. The same content was delivered to each batch in the same form. The end-product was the graduate, stamped with the credential the system was designed to produce.
Dewey’s objection is that the factory model misunderstands what students are. Students are not raw materials. They are developing human beings with their own activity, their own interests, their own emerging citizenship. A school that treats them as raw materials is doing damage on multiple fronts: it represses their actual development, it produces graduates who are passive rather than active, and it teaches by example that being processed by external authority is what schooling is for. The graduates of such a school are exactly the wrong material for a democratic society, which depends on citizens who can act on their own initiative.
The factory model’s persistence is one of Dewey’s continuing frustrations through his writing. Many of the schools that adopted his vocabulary kept the factory structure underneath. They added student-centred language to a system that still treated students as products. The result was a hybrid that was neither fully factory nor fully Deweyan. Dewey was clear that the hybrid was not what he had meant. The factory structure had to actually go, not just be papered over with friendlier vocabulary.
A model that treats students as raw materials passively moulded by teachers, like products on an assembly line
The system sorts children into age batches, moves each batch through a sequence of stations at a fixed pace, delivers the same content in the same form, and stamps out graduates with credentials. Dewey rejected this because students are not raw materials. The factory school teaches by example that being processed by external authority is what schooling is for, producing graduates who are exactly the wrong material for a democratic society.
Democratic principles in schools
Dewey closes with a set of concrete principles for applying democracy in schools. The principles translate the embryonic-society idea into specific school-level commitments.
Schools, Dewey writes, would be freely available to all from kindergarten to college. The condition of equal democratic participation is equal access to the education that produces democratic citizens. A school system that is closed to large sections of the population (by cost, by location, by tracking) is undermining the democracy it is supposed to support. Free public education from the earliest grades to the highest level is the institutional basis for the democratic life that the schools are meant to produce.
Children would carry on the educational process themselves, aided and guided by the teacher. This is the embryonic-society principle in practical form. The students are not the objects of the educational work. They are the agents. The teacher’s role is to aid and guide their work, not to do the work for them or to them.
Students would be trained to behave cooperatively, with sharing and caring for one another. Cooperation is a learned capacity, not a natural one, and the school is one of the few institutions in which children can practise it in a structured way before they need it as adults. A child who has not practised cooperation cannot suddenly become a cooperative adult citizen. The practice has to start where the child lives, which is the school.
The benefits Dewey claims follow from these principles. Students develop into creative and well-adjusted citizens. They emerge from the school as people who can take initiative, think for themselves, work with others, and participate in democratic life as active rather than passive members. The progressive influences radiating from the schools then stimulate and fortify the wider building of a democratic order of free and equal citizens. Schools become the engine of democratic renewal that Dewey’s broader concern called for.
The picture Dewey paints is hopeful. The schools, if reformed along these lines, can produce the kind of citizens that a struggling democracy needs to renew itself. The picture is also demanding. The reform required is deep, involves changing the basic structure of how schools are organised, and resists the easier route of adding student-centred language to a factory school. The reform is the work of generations. Dewey wrote at the start of that work; it is still being completed.
Free schools for all, students as agents of their own education, training in cooperation
(1) Schools freely available to all from kindergarten to college. (2) Children carry on the educational process themselves, aided and guided by the teacher. (3) Students trained to behave cooperatively, sharing and caring for one another. The result is creative, well-adjusted citizens who can take initiative and participate in democratic life. The schools become the engine of democratic renewal.
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