Education as Growth and Development

Dewey’s account of growth is one of his most original contributions to educational philosophy. The standard picture treats growth as the realisation of capacities already present in the child, like an oak unfolding from an acorn. Dewey rejects this picture and replaces it with one in which growth is open-ended and education is its own end. The article works through what this reframing means for the educator.

Society determines its own future

Dewey opens this part of his account with a political observation. Society determines its own future when it determines the future of the young. Since the young make the future adults of the society, the direction given to current children will determine the nature of future adults.

The observation sounds simple. Its implications are large. A society that produces good adults has good schools twenty years before. A society that produces bad adults has bad schools twenty years before. The school system is therefore not just one institution among many; it is the institution that decides what the society itself will become.

This is why Dewey treats educational reform as a serious political project rather than as an administrative matter. Reforming a school is reforming a future society. Failing to reform a school is letting a future society take whatever shape its current schools produce. The political stakes of education are as high as the political stakes of anything else.

The observation also explains why Dewey writes so much about the school as a setting for democratic life. If society is determined by what schools produce, then a society that wants to be democratic has to have schools that produce democratic citizens. The next chapter of his work, on education and democracy, follows directly from this point.

Flashcard

Why does Dewey treat educational reform as a serious political project?

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Answer

Because society determines its own future when it determines the future of its young

The young make the future adults of the society; the direction given to current children determines the nature of future adults. A society that produces good adults has good schools twenty years before. The school system is therefore the institution that decides what the society itself will become. Failing to reform a school is letting a future society take whatever shape its current schools produce.

Immaturity as the condition of growth

Dewey’s central claim about growth is a reframing. Immaturity, he writes, is the primary condition of growth.

The reframing matters. The everyday picture treats immaturity as a deficiency that the young have and the mature do not. The young person is incomplete; growth fills in what is missing; an adult is the completed product. On this picture, immaturity is a problem and growth is the solution.

Dewey reverses the picture. Immaturity is not a deficiency. It is the condition that makes growth possible at all. A fully mature being, in this sense, would have nowhere left to grow. Their development would be complete. They would be finished. Immaturity, by contrast, is the open state in which growth can still happen. The young are not deficient; they are open to development in a way the mature are not.

This reframing has practical consequences. An educator who treats immaturity as a deficiency tries to fill in what is missing as quickly as possible. The goal is to get the child to maturity, and the means is to install the adult content the child does not yet have. An educator who treats immaturity as the condition of growth does something different. They support the developmental work the child is already doing and try to keep the child open to further growth rather than closing them off prematurely.

The same reframing applies to adults. Dewey’s account does not stop at the school years. An adult who remains immature in this technical sense, open to further growth, keeps growing through life. An adult who has reached a settled maturity, closed off, complete, done growing, has stopped. The ideal Deweyan adult is one who never quite finishes the work of growth, because the work of growth is the work of life itself.

Flashcard

What does Dewey mean by saying *immaturity is the primary condition of growth*?

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Answer

Immaturity is not a deficiency; it is the open state in which growth can happen at all

The everyday picture treats immaturity as something the young have and the mature do not, with growth as the filling-in. Dewey reverses this. A fully mature being would have nowhere left to grow; their development would be complete. Immaturity is the open condition for growth. The same applies to adults: an adult who remains open to further growth keeps growing through life; one who has closed off into settled maturity has stopped.

Capacity versus potential

Dewey distinguishes capacity from potential, and the distinction is part of what makes his account of growth open-ended.

Capacity, Dewey says, can be read in a negative meaning. To have a capacity for something is to be able to grow only up to a certain limit. A vessel has a capacity in this sense: it can hold so much, no more. Read this way, capacity sets limits. A child with a particular capacity for learning will grow up to that capacity and stop.

Potential is different. Potential, in Dewey’s usage, can be infinite. To have a potential is not to be limited to a fixed end-point but to be open to development whose end is not pre-set. A child with potential is a child whose growth is not capped at a known limit; the child may develop in directions the educator cannot predict and to extents the educator cannot foresee.

The distinction is more than verbal. An educator who treats a child as having a fixed capacity will design the education to fill that capacity and stop there. An educator who treats the child as having an open potential will design the education to keep the development going as far as it can go, without setting a limit in advance.

The implication is again uncomfortable for some educational practices. Standardised testing, ability tracking, early sorting of students into categories, all of these treat students as having fixed capacities that can be measured and matched. The Deweyan view rejects this. Students have potentials, not fixed capacities, and the educator’s job is to support the open development of those potentials rather than to estimate their capacities and place them.

Flashcard

What is the difference between *capacity* and *potential* in Dewey's account of growth?

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Answer

Capacity sets a limit; potential is open-ended

Capacity is the negative reading: a person can grow only up to a certain extent. Potential is the positive reading: development can continue without a pre-set end. An educator who treats a child as having a fixed capacity designs an education that fills that capacity and stops. An educator who treats the child as having open potential designs an education that keeps the development going. The Deweyan view rejects standardised testing and ability tracking on this basis.

Habits as expressions of growth

Dewey gives habits a more central role than most educators would expect. A habit, in his definition, is a form of executive skill, an efficiency in doing. It is an active control of the environment through control of the actions.

The definition rejects the everyday picture in which habits are mechanical, routine, and unthinking. Dewey is not talking about that kind of habit. He is talking about the cultivated ability to do something well, reliably, without needing to think about every step. A skilled musician’s hands move through a difficult passage with a fluency that is habit in this technical sense; a thoughtful reader’s eye picks out the structure of a paragraph through habits of attention that have been built up over years of reading. The habits are skilled, intelligent, and active.

Habits, in this sense, help the formation of intellect and character. They are not the enemy of thinking; they are part of what makes thinking possible. A reader without the habits of reading cannot read; a thinker without the habits of attention cannot think. Habits also increase the ease, economy, and efficiency of action. A person with the right habits does more with less effort, frees attention for higher-order work, and accomplishes more in the same time. Habits help a person grow because they free the person up to take on new work that they could not have managed if they had to think every routine step from scratch.

Development, Dewey writes, is the formation of habits involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific objects of observation and thought. Each of these phrases is doing work. Executive skill is the capacity to carry out actions effectively. Definiteness of interest is the capacity to care about specific things steadily, rather than flitting from topic to topic. Specific objects of observation and thought are the actual material the developing person is engaging with. A developing person builds up all three through the formation of good habits, and the habits become the platform on which further development happens.

Flashcard

What does Dewey mean by a *habit*, and why are habits important for growth?

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Answer

A cultivated executive skill that enables intelligent action and frees the person for further growth

A habit is an efficiency in doing, an active control of the environment through control of actions. It is not the mechanical routine of the everyday picture; it is the cultivated ability to do something well, reliably, without thinking every step. Habits help the formation of intellect and character and increase ease, economy, and efficiency of action. They free the person to take on new work they could not manage if they had to think every routine step from scratch.

Education has no end beyond itself

The culminating claim of Dewey’s account of growth is short and easy to misread. The educational process, he writes, has no end beyond itself. It is its own end.

The claim is not that education has no purpose. The claim is that education’s purpose is education itself: continued growth, continued development, continued openness to new development. There is no point at which the educational process is supposed to stop because the goal outside it has been reached. The goal is the continued process.

This reframes the practical question of what schools are for. A school does not exist to produce graduates who have completed their education. It exists to produce people whose education will continue indefinitely. The graduate is not a finished product; they are a person whose growth has been launched and who is now equipped to keep growing.

The educational process is one of continual reorganising, reconstructing, and transforming. The growing person rearranges what they know in light of new experience. They reconstruct their understanding when old structures stop working. They transform themselves as they encounter what they had not encountered before. Each of these processes is education. None of them stops when the formal schooling does.

There is nothing to which education is subordinate, Dewey writes, save more education. Education does not exist for the sake of work, for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of culture, or for the sake of religion. It exists for the sake of more education, which is to say more growth, which is to say more life. Education must therefore not cease when one leaves school. The lifelong learning that Adler also called for is, for Dewey, what the whole educational enterprise is finally about.

Flashcard

What does Dewey mean by saying *the educational process has no end beyond itself*?

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Answer

Education’s purpose is continued education itself, not a goal outside the process

A school does not exist to produce graduates who have completed their education. It exists to produce people whose education will continue indefinitely. The educational process is continual reorganising, reconstructing, and transforming, and there is no point at which it is meant to stop. Education is not subordinate to work, citizenship, culture, or religion; it exists for more education, which is more growth, which is more life.