Education as Direction
Dewey: Education as Direction
What direction is
- Education is not only a necessity of life and a social function; it must also provide a direction in which young people will grow into responsible citizens.
- Education must seek to direct, control, and guide.
The environment as directive
- Direction is the basic function of the environment, ranging from gentle guiding assistance at one extreme to active regulation at the other.
- The balance between guidance and regulation is what makes education effective.
- Every stimulus directs activity; it does not just excite it, it directs it toward an object.
- The environment stimulates a person toward a goal.
- Direction can be both successive (across time) and simultaneous.
Modes of social direction
- Adults aim to direct the conduct of the young both consciously and unconsciously.
- The most permanent and influential modes of control are the ones that operate from moment to moment continuously, without deliberate intention.
Imitation and social psychology
- Association with fellow beings is the dominant influence in the formation of mental and moral disposition.
- Social control rests on the instinctive tendency to imitate or copy the actions of others.
- The young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them in their own behaviour.
Application to education
The activities of children today are controlled by selected and charged stimuli (their education). They can therefore move toward enlightenment in a shorter lifetime than the human race needed in earlier ages.
Dewey’s account of education has a social function: it renews the society and facilitates communication across generations. It also has a more pointed job: to direct the young toward becoming responsible adults. Direction has a precise meaning in Dewey’s vocabulary, and it operates through specific mechanisms in real classrooms.
Education must direct
Education, Dewey writes, is not only a necessity of life aimed at the social integration of children. It must also provide them with a direction in which they will grow and eventually become responsible citizens of the world. Education must seek to direct, control, and guide.
The three verbs do different work. Direct points the young toward something: a goal, a way of being, a kind of life worth living. Control keeps the development within bounds, so the young do not wander into damaging paths or stall in unproductive ones. Guide assists when the young need help working out how to proceed. All three are part of what an educator does.
The combination is important. Dewey is sometimes read as a permissive thinker who would let children do whatever they want. The reading is wrong. Dewey is direct that education must seek to direct, control, and guide. He differs from earlier views in how the direction, control, and guidance are exercised, not in whether they should be exercised at all.
The difference shows up in the next claims. Direction in Dewey’s sense is not the heavy-handed imposition of an external programme on a resistant child. It is the careful shaping of the environment so that the child’s own activities are directed toward worthwhile ends. The child does the moving; the educator shapes what the moving heads toward.
Direct, control, and guide
Direct points the young toward a goal, a way of being, a kind of life. Control keeps development within bounds so the young do not wander into damaging paths. Guide assists when the young need help working out how to proceed. Dewey is sometimes misread as a permissive thinker; he is not. He differs from earlier views in how direction is exercised, not in whether it should be exercised.
The environment as directive
The way the direction works, in Dewey’s account, runs through the environment. Direction is the basic function of the environment. It can range, at one extreme, from a gentle guiding assistance to, at the other extreme, an active regulation or ruling. There must be a balance between guidance and regulation for education to be effective. Too far toward gentle assistance and the young drift; too far toward active regulation and they become dependent or resistant. The educator’s job is to find the right balance.
Dewey’s claim about how stimuli work is precise. Every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite the activity or stir it up; it directs the activity toward an object. A noise across the room makes a student look up; the looking up is not just a generic burst of activity, it is activity directed toward the source of the noise. Every stimulus shapes what the responding activity is about.
The environment is therefore continuously directive. The young person responds to the stimuli around them, and the stimuli direct their responses toward whatever the stimuli are about. The environment that a child grows up in is shaping where their activity flows, day after day, year after year.
Environmental stimuli can give direction in various unpredictable ways. The educator cannot fully control where any given stimulus will take any given student. But the educator can make sure that the stimuli around the student are pointing in good directions rather than bad ones. The direction the student takes will then mostly be toward worthwhile objects, even if the specific path is unpredictable.
Direction, Dewey adds, can be both successive and simultaneous. Successive direction shapes the student’s path across time: one stimulus directs them toward an object now, and the response to that object directs them toward another later, in a sequence. Simultaneous direction operates through many stimuli at once, all pointing in compatible directions. A school environment with consistent values, consistent routines, and consistent expectations produces simultaneous direction. The student is being pulled the same way from many angles, and the pull is harder to resist than any single instruction would be.
Stimuli do not just stir activity up; they shape what the responding activity is about
A noise across the room makes the student look up; the looking up is directed toward the source of the noise, not generic activity. The environment is continuously directive. The young person responds to surrounding stimuli, and the stimuli direct their responses toward whatever the stimuli are about. The educator’s job is to make sure the stimuli around the student point in worthwhile directions.
Modes of social direction
Dewey turns next to the human side of direction. Adults aim to direct the conduct of the young both consciously and unconsciously. Both kinds matter, but Dewey insists that the unconscious modes are more important than they look.
The most permanent and influential modes of control are those which operate from moment to moment continuously, without deliberate intention. This is one of Dewey’s most important practical claims. An adult who attends only to their explicit teaching is missing nine-tenths of what they are actually teaching. The tone of voice they use, the way they handle small disappointments, the patience or impatience they bring to ordinary moments, the way they treat people they consider unimportant, all of this is teaching the young who watch them, continuously and without intention.
The implication for the teacher is uncomfortable. A teacher who behaves well in front of the class while behaving badly in the staff room is still teaching the behaviour from the staff room, because the students notice it. A teacher whose stated values diverge from their actual conduct is teaching the actual conduct. The students learn what the teacher does more than what the teacher says.
The same principle applies to schools as institutions. A school that says it values student welfare but is organised around teacher convenience is teaching students that adult convenience trumps student welfare. A school that says it values honesty but tolerates dishonest practices in its administration is teaching students that honesty is a value to display rather than a value to live. The mismatch teaches the students that values are for public display, not for actual life.
The ones that operate from moment to moment continuously, without deliberate intention
An adult who attends only to their explicit teaching is missing nine-tenths of what they are actually teaching. Tone of voice, handling of small disappointments, patience in ordinary moments, treatment of people considered unimportant, all of these teach the young continuously and without intention. A teacher whose stated values diverge from their actual conduct is teaching the actual conduct.
Imitation and the role of social psychology
Dewey stresses the predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition. The young become what they become largely through the people they are around.
The mechanism, Dewey says, is the instinctive tendency to imitate or copy the actions of others. Social control of individuals rests on this instinct. The young person watches the adults and the older children around them and reproduces their patterns of action in their own behaviour. The reproduction is mostly automatic. The young person does not decide to copy; they simply absorb the patterns and act them out.
The imitative instinct is strong enough that the young, Dewey writes, devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behaviour. This is not a complaint; it is an observation. Young human beings are wired to absorb patterns from the people around them. The educator who tries to fight this wiring is doing futile work. The educator who works with the wiring, by ensuring that the patterns around the young are worth absorbing, is doing the right work.
The application to education is direct. The activities of children today are controlled by selected and charged stimuli, the educational environment the school provides. The children can therefore move in the direction of enlightenment in a much shorter lifetime than the human race needed over the ages to attain. The educational shortcut is real. A child who grows up in a well-designed educational environment can reach in twenty years what the species needed thousands of years to develop. The school is the institution that makes this acceleration possible.
The flip side is also real. A child who grows up in a badly designed educational environment can fall back decades or centuries in the direction the imitative instinct takes them. The same wiring that makes acceleration possible makes regression possible. The educator’s choice of what the young are immersed in is therefore consequential beyond what the explicit curriculum alone would suggest.
The instinctive tendency to imitate or copy the actions of others
Young human beings are wired to absorb patterns from the people around them. The reproduction is mostly automatic; the young person does not decide to copy, they simply absorb and act out. The imitative instinct is strong enough that the young devote themselves to conforming to patterns set by others. The educator’s job is to ensure that the patterns around the young are worth absorbing.
Because the imitative instinct lets children absorb selected and charged stimuli at high speed
The activities of children are controlled by the stimuli around them. A well-designed educational environment selects stimuli that point toward enlightenment. The child’s imitative instinct does the work of absorbing the patterns these stimuli demonstrate. The acceleration is real, but it depends on the environment being well-designed; a badly designed environment accelerates the wrong things just as quickly.
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