I hope that in the following statements I do not repeat what
I have previously said in my postings. In this posting I am drawing out
multiple mentions of open-mindedness throughout Dewey’s How We Think, revised edition. I may purchase How We Think in the near future and read it on my own time. It
seems as though I’m getting bits and pieces of it at times, which leads to a
discontinuity in my mind as to where these ideas belong and how they are structured
in Dewey’s philosophy. Indeed the book itself could at least serve as a sort of
reference to organize my research and connect ideas. With permission I will
begin a side study on William Hare’s writings within the next few weeks, as far
as his ideas relate to open-mindedness and allow me to better understand
Karen’s direction with the proposal/dissertation.
In these selections Dewey is discussing the importance of
attitudes concerning education, mentioning affordances and constraints, etc...
He states that If we were compelled to
make a choice between these personal attitudes and knowledge about the
principles of logical reasoning with some degree of technical skill in
manipulating special logical processes, we should decide for the former. (Dewey
140) In other words, the attitudes and ethics of education take precedence
over the reasoning and logical processes of it. But, as Dewey mentions, luckily
there is no real opposition between these two and we do not have to choose.
Rather, it would be wise to unite the logistics and ethics of education.
This unification is one of specific and general
conditions. Specifically a student could be learning math or literature or
history, and these topics belong to the logistic aspect of learning, but in
general a student could be learning responsibility, mindfulness, cultivation of
habit, or in other words the ethics of education, which influence the more
specific functions. In teaching math or history without consideration to the
ethical aspect, one overlooks the foundation of learning, assuming without
reflective consideration that the student understands why they are learning
these specific topics.
I hypothesize that this fault in the educational system
could be due to a sort of transition in learning from a private to a public
matter. Indeed there are many students that do not understand the point of
their learning, and perhaps this is because schooling has become a matter of
societal requirement. In the past, schooling was viewed as a privilege, and
regarded by students as such. From this follows an understanding of the value
of all education, and in turn there is no need to teach the point of one’s education. In contemporary times, at least in
America, schooling is widely available to the masses, and does not hold the
esteem it once had. Students do not come into the public education system with
a high regard and respect for learning. Is it possible to foster that high
regard again? Yes, according to everything Dewey is saying. Surely these
attitudes may be cultivated by limiting public access to education again, but
this is not the ethical answer. What arises is the simple yet constant
necessity to unify the logical and ethical lessons within the mind of the
student. It is the unceasing answering to the question of why. Perhaps the global citizen is in truth (and simply) the
citizen that is taught to cultivate ethical importance in their schooling.
Dewey, John. “How We Think, Revised Edition.” The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol 8
(1933), pp140-348
As educators, I think it’s important to encourage our students to think critically about why they are being asked to do what we are asking them to do, but it is equally important for us to ask ourselves why we want them to engage in this task. Regarding multicultural rhetorical strategies in a writing class, for example, why might I think it’s important to require my students to actually engage in writing in a rhetorical style typical of a different culture? I mean, so what if American students know what it means to write an essay in the Japanese or Arabic style? The key is the “mindfulness” component. Students who plan to live and work in a multicultural society, which most of them will do, should be mindful of the differences between their own habits and those of others. And it’s not enough to simply recognize that there are differences but also to critically think about why those differences exist and to engage actively in experiencing the habit of the “other” culture.
ReplyDeleteAs you said, an important goal of education must be"the simple yet constant necessity to unify the logical and ethical lessons within the mind of the student.”
What I’ve been grappling with recently is the work of those who criticize Dewey for being racist when we are interpreting from his work that he valued “the citizen that is taught to cultivate ethical importance in their schooling." In other words, can we say with confidence that Dewey aimed to combine the logistics and ethics of education when some contemporary scholars say that he was racist? Much more time and reading is required to get to the bottom of these questions.