Dewey's Democracy and Education (1)

            In the “School as Special Environment” section, Dewey begins to move beyond training and socialization to discuss what “office” the school holds that makes it important in and of itself. He writes,

“…our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible structures.  Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters.”

            This quote is so important because it makes clear that idea school not only has a specific function beyond training young people to exhibit behaviors that will make them socially acceptable, or even preparing for the roles they will have in their own communities and nations, it exists because without it, we cannot help people make sense of the world outside their immediate communities.  There are people and systems whose actions affect ours, and vice versa, and schools are the formal institution whose job it is to teach people how that happens.  I think we forget that all too often, and/or we move the “making sense of the world” part of education to colleges and universities, leaving large groups of people out of the process.  He continues,     

“…it is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from the influence upon mental habitudes.  It establishes a purified medium of action…As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society.  The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end”

            Dewey opened Democracy and Education with a discussion of human reproduction, and here he begins to discuss social reproduction, and the role the school has in shaping it.  Whereas previous thinkers we’ve looked at have talked about reason and its relation to morality, and the idea of humans becoming more moral with each generation if education is executed properly, I feel like Dewey articulates these ideas in a way that incorporates agency in a way other thinkers hadn’t.  For him, education and communication don’t exist in a vacuum.  So even as we become better thinkers or “reasoners”, the school has to make choices about what past human achievements are worth teaching in order to help create a better society. Just knowing things, or being able to reason, doesn’t make humans better over time. Dewey then goes on to say,

            “In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with the broader environment.  Such words as “society” and “community” are likely to be misleading, for they have the tendency to make us think that there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.”

            Humans, according to this passage, are equally limited in their ability to know about the world outside of their immediate society, no matter what social group their born into.  I know this passage can be used to argue for the importance of education because of its ability to help people gain better class positions.  But for me it’s a great reminder that any position in society is limited if it remains connected from the greater world. Furthermore, it reminds me to resist the idea that there is only one way to understand community and society, rather there are communities and societies, all acting upon and reacting to each other, making education much more complex, but also that much more necessary if you agree with Dewey’s idea of the purpose of schools.