Education as Necessity and Social Function
Dewey: Education as Necessity and Social Function
Education as necessity of life
- Without education, a life would be miserable.
- The most important distinction between the living and the inanimate is that the living maintains itself by renewal.
- Teaching and learning are needed for society’s continued existence so individuals can renew themselves in a way that befits human beings.
- Communities need to communicate, and education facilitates this process.
Incidental education
A person gains education by living with other people in a community and communicating with them. This education is natural and important, but it is not the express reason of the association.
The place of formal education
- Individuals must be enabled, through formal education, to share a common life.
- Undeveloped social groups usually have little or no modes of formal training.
Education as a social function
- Education is the responsibility of the peers of the society to ensure that the young are properly educated.
- Education is a fostering, nurturing, and nourishing process.
- It involves communicating the general beliefs and ideals of a society to its young.
- Dewey believed in educating indirectly by means of the environment, not directly.
The social environment
A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. They cannot perform their own activities without taking into consideration the activities of others.
The social medium as educative
The unconscious influence of the environment is subtle and pervasive, yet it affects every fibre of character and mind. It must give direction to youth in language habits and manners.
The school as a special environment
The only way adults consciously control the kind of education the young receive is by controlling the environment in which the young act, think, and feel.
Functions of the school environment
- Breakdown: complex civilisation must be broken into portions for gradual assimilation.
- Elimination of undesirable features: the school filters out unworthy features of the surrounding environment.
- Balance and opportunity: the school balances the various elements in the social environment and gives each individual the chance to escape the limitations of the social group they were born into.
Dewey’s account of education begins with a biological observation and ends with a social one. The article works through the chain: why education is a necessity of life, how a society educates incidentally before any school exists, and what a formal school is finally for.
Education as a necessity of life
Dewey’s first move is to ground education in biology. A living thing differs from an inanimate one in that the living thing maintains itself by renewal. A rock weathers and crumbles. A tree, in contrast, takes in water, sunlight, and nutrients and renews itself continuously through its own growth. The renewal is what makes it living rather than inert.
The same principle applies at the level of a human community. A society is alive in this sense if it keeps renewing itself across generations. Children grow into adults, take on the work of the community, raise the next generation, and continue. If the renewal stops, the society dies, even if its buildings stand and its records survive.
Education is the means of this renewal. Teaching and learning are needed for the continued existence of society. Without education, the renewal cannot happen properly, because the young have to be brought into the work of the community through deliberate communication. A community that does not educate its young is interrupting its own life-process.
Dewey adds that communities need to communicate, and education facilitates this process. Communication is the mechanism by which the older generation passes on what it has worked out to the younger. The communication is not just of information; it is of practices, values, attitudes, ways of seeing. Education in Dewey’s wide sense is the work of this whole communication.
The implication is sober. Education is not a luxury added on top of life. It is a necessity of life. A community without working education has the same problem a tree without water has: the renewal cannot continue, and what looks alive today is dying by tomorrow.
Because a community renews itself across generations through education, and a community that does not educate is dying
The distinction between living and inanimate is that the living maintains itself by renewal. A society is alive in this sense only if it keeps renewing itself across generations. Children grow into adults and take on the work of the community; education is the means by which this renewal happens. A community that does not educate its young is interrupting its own life-process, even if its buildings stand.
Incidental and formal education
Dewey distinguishes between incidental and formal education. The distinction is one of his quiet but important contributions.
Incidental education is what a person gains simply by living with other people in a community and communicating with them. This is the largest part of any person’s education. A child learns to talk, to behave, to take on the values of those around them, to fit into the community’s ways of life, none of this through any formal lesson. It happens because the child is present, watching, listening, imitating, and absorbing. The community is teaching whether or not anyone is intending to teach.
Incidental education is natural and important. Dewey does not dismiss it. He treats it as the foundation on which any formal education has to be built. The child arrives at school already shaped by years of incidental learning at home, in the neighbourhood, and in the wider community. A school that ignores this prior education is starting from a false picture of the child’s actual state.
The distinguishing feature of incidental education is that it is not the express reason of the association. A family is not formed in order to educate the child; it is formed for other reasons, and the education happens as a side-effect of the family’s daily life. A neighbourhood does not exist to educate its young people; it exists for other reasons, and the education happens on the way.
Formal education is different. A formal school exists for the purpose of educating. The teaching is its express reason, not a side-effect. Dewey’s claim is that formal education becomes necessary at a certain level of social complexity. Individuals must be enabled, through formal education, to share a common life. Once a society’s accumulated knowledge, practices, and culture become too large for the young to absorb through ordinary daily life, a special institution has to be created for the express purpose of passing on what cannot be passed on incidentally.
The historical generalisation Dewey draws is illuminating. Undeveloped social groups usually have little or no modes of formal training. The reason is that the cultural inheritance is small enough to be passed on through daily life. As cultures grow more complex, the formal institutions have to grow with them. A culture with a long literary tradition, a body of accumulated science, and a complex set of social practices cannot transmit all of this through incidental education alone. The school is the institution that takes over what the incidental cannot handle.
Incidental education is the by-product of living in a community; formal education is the express purpose of a school
Incidental education happens through daily life: a child learns to talk, behave, and absorb values without anyone planning to teach. Formal education is the work of a school whose express reason for existing is to educate. Incidental education is the foundation; formal education becomes necessary when a society’s accumulated knowledge becomes too large for daily life to transmit on its own. Undeveloped societies have little formal training because their cultural inheritance is small.
Education as a social function
Once the necessity of education is established, the next question is who is responsible for it. Dewey’s answer is clear. Education is a social function. It is the responsibility of the peers of the society to ensure that the young receive proper education.
Education, in his account, is a fostering, nurturing, nourishing process. The vocabulary is biological: the educator does for the developing person what a gardener does for a developing plant. The process involves communicating the general beliefs and ideals of a society to its young. Each generation hands on what it has worked out, and the next generation takes the inheritance forward.
A central Dewey commitment is that the educator should never educate directly but always indirectly by means of the environment. The environment is the actual teaching tool. A teacher who tries to install content directly into the student’s head is using the wrong mechanism. A teacher who shapes the environment so that the student naturally encounters what they need to learn is using the right one.
The reasoning behind this preference connects to Dewey’s account of the social environment. A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment, and that being cannot perform their own activities without taking into consideration the activities of others. The social environment is therefore continuously teaching the person what to do, how to do it, and what to value. The unconscious influence of the environment is subtle and pervasive, yet it affects every fibre of the character and mind.
A formal educator works with this environmental teaching rather than against it. They shape the environment of the school so that the environment itself does much of the educational work. The students absorb language habits, manners, and ways of relating to others from the social setting of the school just as they absorb them from the home and the neighbourhood. The teacher’s job is to make sure the school’s setting is doing useful teaching rather than damaging teaching.
The environment is the actual teaching tool; the educator shapes it rather than installing content directly
A teacher who tries to install content directly into the student’s head is using the wrong mechanism. A teacher who shapes the environment so the student naturally encounters what they need to learn is using the right one. The social environment is continuously teaching the person what to do and what to value, often unconsciously. The educator works with this environmental teaching by attending to the conditions of the school setting.
The school as a special environment
The argument culminates in Dewey’s account of the school as a special environment, designed and controlled for educational purposes. The only way adults can consciously control the kind of education the young receive is by controlling the environment in which the young act, think, and feel. The school is the institution where this controlled environment can be created and maintained.
Dewey identifies three functions a school environment is designed to perform.
The first is breakdown. A complex civilisation is too complex to be assimilated whole. It must be broken down into portions in a gradual and graded way so that the young can take it in across the years of their development. The school provides this graded breakdown. A young child is not given the whole of human knowledge at once; they are given the pieces appropriate to their age, in an order that lets the later pieces rest on the earlier ones.
The second is elimination of undesirable features. The wider social environment contains many influences that the educator does not want the young to absorb. Some of the values, practices, and habits of the surrounding society are corrupting or limiting. The school’s job is to filter out the unworthy features of the existing environment so they do not shape the mental habits of the young. This is a controlled environment in the strong sense: the school does not simply mirror the wider society, it improves on it by selection.
The third is balance and opportunity. The wider social environment is rarely balanced. Different children grow up in different parts of it, exposed to different fragments, with very different opportunities. The school’s job is to balance the various elements in the social environment so that each individual child gets exposure to the whole rather than just to whatever fragment their birth gave them. This includes the chance to escape the limitations of the social group the child was born into. A child born into a poor family in a neglected neighbourhood is, in the wider environment, going to absorb the limitations of that setting. The school environment can give them exposure to a wider range and the chance to develop beyond what their birth circumstances would otherwise allow.
The third function is the most strongly democratic. Dewey saw the school as a leveller, a place where the accident of birth could be partly compensated for by the deliberate balance of the school environment. This is part of his case for taking schools seriously as engines of democratic society.
Breakdown, elimination of undesirable features, and balance with opportunity
(1) Breakdown: complex civilisation is broken into portions for gradual assimilation across the years of development. (2) Elimination: the school filters out the unworthy features of the surrounding environment so they do not shape the young. (3) Balance and opportunity: the school balances the various elements so each child gets exposure to the whole and the chance to escape the limitations of the social group they were born into.
How was this article?