**3. Dewey's fivefold themes in** *My Pedagogic Creed*

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, USA, on 20th October 1859. His father was Archibald Sprague Dewey, and his mother was Lucina Artemisia Rich. He attended the University of Vermont and John Hopkins University. Dewey was a leading figure in pragmatic philosophy and a significant voice in educational reforms in 20th-century America. His pragmatic philosophy underlines his books on education: *My Pedagogic Creed* (1897); *The Primary-Education Fetish* (1898); *The School and Society* (1900); *The Child of the Curriculum* (1902); *Democracy and Education* (1916); *Schools of Tomorrow* (1915); and a co-authored book *Experience and Education* (1938). His most famous book is *My Pedagogic Creed*.

Writing at the turn of the 20th-century, when the task of education was to produce labor to serve the needs of industries, Dewey challenged the current education structure. His model focused on the interaction between the school and society as the entwined focus of authentic education. Consensus on the literature on Dewey links him to Hegel's non-idealistic influences. However, he deferred in his quest for

*Making Higher Education Count in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from John Dewey's… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104087*

non-reductionist psychological concepts on social, mind, and consciousness. Also, Darwin's *Origin of Species* likely influenced Dewey's thoughts on progressive education. There is a strong connection between William James and John Dewey. Dewey advanced concepts on pragmatism that James initiated. His "melioristic, pragmatic account of social practice; his emphasis upon the importance of habits in organized human life; his presentation of the role of philosophy as a means of improving daily life; his recognition of the social nature of the self; and his call for a rejection of religious traditions and institutions in favor of an emphasis upon religious experience" are all indications of themes from James' philosophical thoughts ([16], p. 614).

#### **3.1 What is education?**

Dewey sees education as a conglomeration of the "social consciousness" of either the whole human race or a specific aspect ([17], p. 3). All community members are introduced to this consciousness from birth, and it continues through their adult lives. The daily exchange of ideas, concepts, and emotions are some of the ways by which members are educated. Broadly, these processes are unconscious. "Through this unconscious education, the individual comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources" of his or her society ([17], p. 3). Also, the individual inherits and contributes to this legacy of education within the community. Thus, Dewey suggests that formal education is either the organization of the legacy of socialization to make learners understand and participate in it or a systematic process by which the various elements of the legacy of education are categorized to point individuals to specific directions in the ongoing process of civilization.

Dewey believes formal education has two dimensions—psychological and sociological. The psychological aspect focuses on developing the individual's internal competencies—the individual's unique way of thinking, behaving, and feeling. An advanced version of these competencies provides a self-understanding that translates self-preservation into sociability. The individual acts "as a member of a unit, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs" ([17], pp. 3–4).

The sociological aspect of education is interested in the clarification of values and meaning from the collective standpoint. These values and meaning provide a framework by which the individual understands his or her place in the community. Individuals acquire knowledge about positive and negative social behaviors through the sociological aspect of formal education. This knowledge helps the individual use his or her internal competencies for meaningful development in his or her community.

Accordingly, Dewey thinks that education must move from the psychological component to the sociological component. He states, "…the psychological is the basis. The child's own instinct and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education" ([17], p. 4). He calls on all educators to understand the internal competencies of the learner, without which formal education will be "reduced to a pressure from without" ([17], p. 4). At best, such a system of education will be "haphazard and arbitrary" ([17], p. 4). Worst, it may lead to "friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child's nature" ([17], p. 4).

The sociological dimension determines the goal of formal education. The individual's internal competencies are appropriately classified and empowered within the social context. The social reflection on these internal competencies provides direction to the individual. While the social context indicates the place of individuals in the shared educational experience, it also propels them to participate in the community's

aspirations. By knowing where the community is heading in the future, individuals are directed to what must be achieved to continue contributing to the legacy of education in the community.

For Dewey, both the psychological and sociological dimensions are "organically related" ([17], p. 5). No attempt should be made to pitch one against the other as in a "compromise" or "superimposition" ([17], p. 5). While the psychological component assists the individual to come to terms with his or her internal competencies, the sociological dimension points the individual towards society's aspirations. Awareness of societal advancement prepares the individual to contribute towards society's progress.

#### **3.2 The school**

Dewey sees the school as a "social institution" that continues the education started by society ([17], p. 7). The school environment must ensure that the learner is a participant in the legacy of knowledge. It must seek to help the learner contribute to the ongoing experience of knowledge. Dewey believes education must focus on preparation for life instead of being preoccupied with the future ([17], p. 6).

Society introduces the learning experience to the learner through social interactions at home, neighborhood, and playground. However, these experiences are vast, and their complexities are likely to disorient the learner: "Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction…" ([17], p. 7).

Being part of the larger community, the school must be an extension of the educational experiences. It must simplify the details of these experiences so the learner can quickly grasp them. The school must present the realities of life in an organized manner in ways that are meaningful to the learner. The aim is to make the learner understand societal values, activities, and observations and identify their place in it. The focus must be on social life—the school must be a continuation of social interactions and assist the learner to develop soft skills in his or her social relations. In particular, the learner must be assisted to develop self-control. The learner will master appropriate ways to respond to complex conditions embedded in social interactions in the larger society through self-regulation. Teachers must encourage the learner to select good influences and responses from these social relations. Teachers can do this through their "larger experience" and "riper wisdom" ([17], p. 9).

Similarly, school discipline must replicate the elements of discipline in society. Once the learner understands the importance of these disciplinary elements, they would integrate them into their social lives. They would become law-abiding citizens. This is why school assessment must test the learner's consciousness of social relatedness, adaptation, and adjustments needed to be significant members of society ([17], p. 9).

#### **3.3 Subject-matter/curriculum**

Dewey believes that the social life of the learner should be the basis of the curriculum ([17], p. 10). The curriculum organizes the unconscious experience of social life so learners can have self-direction. Accordingly, any subject of study unrelated to the learner's social life must be rejected ([17], p. 10). For example, the study of nature concerning diversity in space, time, physical objects, living organisms, and geography will not benefit the learner if they do not help them understand social life. In the same vein, literature serves the learner's interests better when it is made the interpreter of

#### *Making Higher Education Count in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from John Dewey's… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104087*

the learner's social life. Dewey states that these important contents of science and humanities ought to "follow upon and not precede" social experience ([17], p. 10).

Further, disassociating history from the learner's social life places it in "the distant past," making it "dead and inert" ([17], p. 11). The learner gains more from the study of history when it is presented as a record of the development of social life. Similarly, it is expected that the curriculum will connect language to the social life of the learner. As a "social instrument," language is the channel by which the learner shares thoughts in his or her social relations ([17], p. 12). When it is detached from the social experience of the learner, "language loses its social motive, and end" ([17], p. 12).

Engaging learners in "social activities" connects the subjects to the social experience ([17], p. 10). Through these activities, the learner becomes aware of the ongoing social heritage and values of his or her community. Social activities in the curriculum build on what the learner has already been introduced: cocking, sewing, and manual training. They give a social element to the educational process and are foundational to developing essential skills that make learners participate in social life.

To this end, Dewey rejects the practice of subject/course successions ([17], p. 12). Subject/courses succession is reserving some courses for more advanced stages in the learning process. Instead, he advocates for the early inclusion of all the components of social life to the learner. He claims, "if education is life, all life has, from the onset, a scientific aspect, an aspect of art, and culture, and an aspect of communication" ([17], p. 12).

The curriculum cannot serve its real purpose with course/subject succession. Instead, Dewey believes the curriculum should be "a continuing reconstruction of experience" ([17], p. 13). This reconstruction would measure the learner's development of the "attitudes" and "interest" in his or her social experience ([17], p. 13).

#### **3.4 Method**

For Dewey, method refers to the orderly development of learners' responses to social experiences. The learner manifests progressive control of his or her social experience through personal competencies and interests. For this reason, the right approach to education is a focus on activity. This is because "conscious impression" emerges from "expression" ([17], p. 13). When the learner is introduced to activities, he or she forms ideas "intellectual and rational processes" that assist him or her towards a "better control of action" ([17], p. 14). Activities induce reasoning and basis for reasoning and judgment that the learner uses to bring order into his or her social experience: "reason is primarily the law of order and effective action" ([17], p. 14). Without activities, the educational process makes the learner passive. Such passivity produces "a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas" ([17], p. 14).

Again, the right approach to education must put personal images into proper focus. Images are valued when the learner forms/creates them from their engagement with reality. Accordingly, the right approach to education is to equip learners to create personal images of their social experiences.

Further, authentic education will make learners' interests in the educational process a priority. Interests are foundational to learners' progressive responses to reality—they are the window into the learner's store of competencies. Focusing on these interests predicts the direction of the learner in the educational process. It virtually makes the learner lead the way to self-development. When interests are prioritized, it produces an "intellectual curiosity and alertness" that predicts the learner's development ([17], p. 15).

Moreover, the correct approach to education will create an environment in which emotions follow from actions. Dewey believes sentiments are the automatic results

from action and that by establishing or generating habits of beneficial social action, the learner will automatically generate good emotions. Reversing the relation between actions and emotions is to introduce sentimentalism into the educational process. According to Dewey, sentimentalism is worse than the combined effect of "deadness and dullness, formalism, and routine" of failed education ([17], p. 16).

#### **3.5 School and social progress**

Dewey sees education as the proper means to "social progress and reform" ([17], p. 16). Authentic education imbibes the orderly evaluation of societal values, leading to reconstructing and applying these values for societal advancement. There are two dimensions to this end—individualistic and socialistic. While the individualistic factor focuses on personal character development for "right living," the socialistic component aims at the "right character" in the context of community life ([17], p. 16). These two dimensions combine to make ethical living the ultimate end of the educational process. When the school furthers the attainment of moral duties of the community, the larger society is equipped to regulate and "formulate its own purposes…organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move" ([17], p. 17).

It should be the aim of the larger society to provide resources for authentic education as it will inure societal development. Schools should use the "human experience" as a focal point to organize the arts and sciences ([17], p. 17). The proper relationship between the arts and the sciences will assist learners in regulating their prowess and make them understand reality and the conscious "organization of individuals" in society ([17], p. 18). The combination of arts and science will result in "the most commanding motive for human action…the most genuine springs of human conduct aroused, and the best service that human nature is capable of" (X). To this end, the teacher's duty is the "formation of the proper social life" ([17], p. 18). The larger society must motivate teachers to target "the maintenance of social order and the securing of the right social growth" ([17], p. 18).

### **4. Discussions**

Dewey thinks it is impossible to "foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now" ([17], p. 6). He argues that education cannot train individuals for "any precise set of conditions" in the future ([17], p. 6). Such impossibility in predicting the future of society could have been valid during Dewey's era. At the turn of the 19th century, political and socioeconomic realities set in motion several uncertainties. The inability of science to fulfill its promise to society paved the way for the "law of chance" ([18], p. 116).

Socioeconomic conditions are different in the 21st-century. A knowledge-based information economy requires society to work towards the mastery of controlling and understanding the elements of nature to enhance human life. Education today has translated this quest into STEM education. These STEM elements have been structured into socioeconomic goals—Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hence, society can predict its direction in the future.

Dewey might be limited in knowing the future direction of society, but his ideas on education as preparation for life is as accurate today as when he wrote these words: "to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means to train *Making Higher Education Count in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from John Dewey's… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104087*

him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently" ([17], p. 6). Proper education will prepare all learner's senses to contribute to the present and future advancement of his or her society.

While the call to make education respond to current conditions is critical, a complete disassociation from future realities may not be helpful to both the learner and the larger society. The legacy of experience that forms the core of education has past, present, and future dimensions. Society aspires to advance towards determined goals. These goals must be incorporated into education to equip learners with the skills and courage to respond to systemic changes of both the present and future life. Education must indeed prepare learners for life, but it is also true that societal life includes aspirations towards comprehensive advancement.

Dewey's experimental/progressive educational ideas have been criticized for insufficient foundational knowledge and academic skills. Theory supports practice/ experience and to emphasize the latter to the utter neglect of the former creates a gap in the process of education ([19], p. 287). Prior interactions with reality have produced detailed literature that establishes a context for the learner ([19], p. 132). This literary context provides a framework that underscores the source, context, and aim of the subject matter and the entire educational process. Nathalie Bulk correctly stated that "cognitive development must depend on reflection and social interaction from concrete problematic situations" ([20], p. 603).

Theories give directives on what has been done and what needs improvement in a given discipline. Ignoring these established theoretical concepts implies isolating experience/practice from those theories that birth and direct them. Unfortunately, Dewey's experimentalism is built on a "functional separation, in the understanding of meaning between observed or experienced phenomenon and theoretical constructs" ([20], p. 575).

Dewey has also been accused of creating an educational process that undermines school authority and organization ([21], pp. 29–30). Experience has varied contents, and it needs to be organized appropriately to be relevant to the learner's context. This implies a sort of order in the school setting. The relevance of order to the overall educational process attests to the teacher's role in the school. Teachers' personalities, attitudes, and didactics cannot be detached from the learning process. They unconsciously influence the content of the exchanges in the teaching and learning process. To some extent, teacher factors make learners' experiences actionable.

Undermining teachers' authority in the school through an incautious focus on the learner's experience is likely to introduce a level of anarchy into the school. Accordingly, Henry T. Edmondson III has blamed Dewey's educational reforms for causing teacher frustrations and general disinterestedness in education in contemporary American society ([22], p. xiv). A weaker teacher's role in the learning process would introduce some disorganization into the educational process. Eventually, this disorganization may endanger classroom management and the quest for relevance in the learner's experience. For Diane Ravitch, Dewey's experimentalism has made education anti-intellectual, "restricting learners' access to established records of human civilizations" ([23], p. 285).

With Dewey's idea of coordination between the school and the society, learners can extend such anarchy to the community. Educated individuals would undermine constituted authority by following their desire for self-preservation at the expense of social integration, cohesion, and inclusiveness ([19], p. 156). Any school that produces self-centered learners can plunge the larger society into a state of chaos.

Dewey is against the subordination or compromise of one dimension of education to the other. He argues that "if we eliminate the social factor from the child, we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass" ([17], p. 6). Nevertheless, Dewey recommends an interpretation of the "child's capacities, interests, and habits" ([17], p. 6). One wonders how this interpretation could be made without "pressure from without" ([17], p. 4). Whose frame of reference must be used in this interpretation: society or the individual? Dewey does not address this confusing interface of the two dimensions of education in his theory. His reliance on the teacher to "select influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences" is confusing ([17], p. 9). While he forbids any imposition in the educational process, he leaves this vital task to the teacher's "larger experience" and "riper wisdom" ([17], p. 9). Chances are that the teacher's inclination to specific elements in social relationships would influence learning contents. Dewey's concept of authentic education breaks down when learners cannot connect with teacherdetermined content. Nevertheless, experienced teachers ought to determine the contents of these influences based on what works in the larger society.

Though Dewey attempts to establish a strong connection between the psychological and sociological dimensions of education, much of his discourse leans towards psychological rather than sociological aspects. He claims that the learner's social context must be the key reference point for authentic education. Dewey emphasized, "experience, leaving little room for mind ideas and institutions which are at the heart of the learning process" ([24], p. 13). Dewey personalizes the educational process leaving it to the desire of each learner. Little room is given to the community in the educational process. The community only gains through learners' positive contributions to the ongoing human experience. One wonders how such an educational system can ultimately work out the collective social interest ([19], p. 238).

The community's disengagement from the educational process creates a vacuum that could be explored to reject societal values. I. B. Berkson notes that Dewey's focus on social experience is borne out of "naturalism, behaviorism, and individualism… slights moral values, since…historical traditions and communal living" produces societal values ([24], p. 13). In order to meet the exigencies of contemporary society, authentic education must balance the connection between the school and its social context in ways that are relevant to the learner's social experience.

Dewey's rejection of the practice of course/subject succession is laudable. It fits nicely into his notion that education prepares learners for life in its entirety ([17], p. 12). Learners who get an early introduction to all aspects of the educational process will likely develop and master various competencies that help them understand and control their experiences for personal and collective benefits. Succession should, however, occur in the contents of the subject. Advanced concepts in these subjects must be reserved for advanced stages in the educational process since grasping such concepts require some depth of comprehension. Otherwise, the educational process will introduce the same complexities embedded in the unconscious social experience of the learner, leading to the learner's disorientation and lack of focus.

Dewey's educational reform might have envisaged human advancement and emerging existential issues in a knowledge-based information society. He expected that the school could only be relevant to the ongoing human experience when constructed as a "miniature of society itself" ([25], pp. 506–507). However, his obsession with the overt experiences of learners limits the comprehensive role of theory and the operations of established social institutions in the educational process. Instead of setting the community as a beneficiary of authentic education, he could have equally detailed extensive role of the social context in the learning process. An application of Dewey's pragmatic theory

of education in Sub-Saharan Africa must combine the values of the African social context with higher education to assist learners in understanding their social experiences.
