Page 1.2: Sections 7-12
7. LIBERAL EDUCATION'S 4 BASIC VALUES
This section talks about 4 basic values upon which Dewey’s liberal educational model rests; an equally important 5th value, namely character development, will be talked about in later sections. In any case, however, liberal parents, teachers, and students should know a little about them, why they’re so important, and how they might be taught in both homes and schools. Those 4 values are: 1. Equal rights; 2. Separation of church and state; 3. Political or popular control of the economy; and 4. International systems of justice. Giving students a feel for why they’re so important will not only make their own schools more democratic, but also help make and keep our government a democracy of, by, and for the people, rather than for the greediest 1% of our society. In fact, such liberal values form the essence of what's called liberal Individualism, celebrated by people like John Dewey. It's very different from what's called aristocratic individualism, which is undemocratic, and much less concerned with everyone's welfare. People like Aristotle, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche are examples of it; for them people are naturally divided into different classes, and so shouldn’t be helped with public institutions to learn how to live better lives. It interferes with nature’s survival-of-the-fittest law.
In truth, many conservative rich folks still practice aristocratic individualism, and thus feel they have a natural right to keep increasing their own wealth and political power. For example, as the Greek economy today is becoming more dysfunctional and stressful, many rich Greeks continue living as if nothing is wrong and their money should be put in stable foreign banks, like in Switzerland, as used to buy expensive New York, London, or Paris real estate. No doubt, even conservative Socrates and Plato would be ashamed of the Greek people for allowing that situation to continue. In their day rich folks were expected to pay for the state’s defenses and cultural events. However, when such values aren’t taught to the next generations, it becomes almost impossible to practice them. And so even today, those 4 liberal habit-arts form the philosophic pillars upon which can more easily grow a more humane and less feudalistic social system than now exists in many countries, even the US. Many conservatives today may see such ideas as really more liberal propaganda, and even socialist or communist. It’s easy to merely attack ideas, but the new way to judge ideas is by their actual results. In fact, all 4 of those values have their roots in ancient Greece’s liberal tradition, and began growing decades before conservative Plato was even born!
1. Equal Rights for Law-Abiding People
The basic idea was eloquently expressed by the great agnostic and humanist Robert Ingersoll, one of the US’s best public speakers of the late 1800s. Mark Twain called him the most intelligent person he’d even heard speak. Ingersoll said the best people gladly offer to others the rights they claim for themselves! In a nut shell that is the new democratic value growing today. With that idea he painted yet another line between the medieval and modern worlds. In the medieval world, and in many conservative schools today, people often feel they just shouldn’t tolerate those with different habits, thus they have a right and duty to make others conform to their model, and also deny them their democratic equal rights if they don’t learn what they’re told to learn. In schools it’s called flunking and failing. With those kinds of habit-arts and actions our conservative feudalistic world lives on.
The modern liberal democratic quest for equal rights is certainly not a new idea; many ancient Greek liberals talked about making life better, more equal, more satisfying, and more peaceful for all citizens, and later for all people. For example, in the 400s BCE liberals began attacking one of the ancient world’s worst and most inhumane institutions, slavery! Why? The results were not only degrading and humiliating to innocent people, but it created the feeling such differences were really a part of nature itself. Even as Socrates was discussing philosophic ideas with young Greek men, slaves were being bought and sold right around him.
Today we liberals still see many forms of slavery, even in our public schools where children do not have the freedom to study what they want, and where they must learn what they’re told to learn. In such schools, then, the next generation comes to feel they must obey those with more authority, do what they’re told, and even worse, not learning how to intelligently keep making our world a better place for everyone, not just the wealthy. Such feelings have helped keep democracy hibernating for thousands of years.
Democratic equal rights began growing in Athens in the early 500s BCE with this feeling: we Greek citizens have a natural right to democratically share our city-state’s political, economic, and judicial power, instead of allowing only a small group of aristocrats to have such power. Such feelings began growing with the help of one of Plato’s own ancestors, a man named Solon. Eventually he helped break up aristocratic monopoly power in Athens and make life more equal and less dangerous for its citizens. And then after him democratic power and choice continued growing, eventually with the help of ancient Greece's greatest liberal voice, Democritus of Abdera. His travels convinced him all people are part of the same human species, and so have a natural human right to the same freedoms and choices as anyone else. Equal rights are certainly not a new idea.
The following political history can be easily learned in liberal schools during the 3rd stage of student development, what's called the abstract level -- those 16-18 years. What was happening in Athens in the early 500s BCE? Well, Greek farmers around Athens, for example, lived as many people continue living today, in a basically feudalistic political and economic system. In it judicial, legislative, and economic power was concentrated and monopolized by a small aristocratic land-owning class. And so they had passed a favorable set of laws to themselves; in effect they controlled the legislative and judicial systems; also only aristocrats could run for office. Like many of today's greedy rich, they kept working for more and more social power. They even legalized selling people into slavery who couldn’t pay their debts.
When small Athenian farmers continued seeing their debt increase when crops failed, their land was often swallowed up by larger aristocratic landowners, just like many corporations today keep buying smaller businesses; in the 1800s John Rockefeller was a master at such business practices. So, in Athens wealthy aristocrats gained a working monopoly of land, used it to keep creating larger estates for themselves, and thus produced large amounts of stress in the lower classes. How could people continue feeding their families without land?
So the challenge for citizens simply became to better organize their democratic power, let the authorities know something needs to be done, and then elect the man to change it. In effect it was an early example of how democratic power can help equalize and improve a stressful feudalistic system. Much the same thing happened in the early 1200s when English barons and Church officials finally forced King John to sign Magna Charta and start sharing more of his political and religious power. In fact thousands more examples of how democratic power can lessen stressful social situations have happened in Western history, and they should be celebrated in liberal schools.
Those early Athenians certainly didn't want equality for everyone; slaves often worked their farms, just as serfs worked medieval farms and slaves worked US cotton plantations. And women were still denied citizenship. But they wanted more democratic power of their own, and organized to get it. Eventually, Solon was elected to make some democratic improvements. At the time he was the right person for the job; his father had been an aristocrat but he also had a humane and kind heart, and was generous towards poorer Athenians; in short, he had a democratic feeling of equality.
What’s more, Solon already had a good reputation. He had successfully led an invasion of Salamis by the Athenians; he was the General Eisenhower of his day. That victory convinced many people the gods had given him some special wisdom and power. At the time most everyone still believed the gods controlled people and events, so they thought Solon was favored by them. In effect they gave him absolute power to break up the old feudal aristocratic monopolies, so power could be more equally shared and life could become less stressful. Thus began growing the liberal idea of equal rights. Solon admitted: "They are rich because they use unjust methods." Less than 200 years later one of Solon’s descendants produced history’s most famous conservative, Plato.
In liberal schools such history becomes more than a little important. If nothing else, it shows students what kinds of intelligent democratic power they can create when they become more organized and focused on building a more democratic society. Obviously the Athenian lower class of artisans and the growing middle class of merchants could have raised their own army, violently overthrown the aristocracy, and installed their own tyrant. However, they acted more intelligently; they simply found a reformer agreeable to both them and the aristocrats, and gave him the power to pass more equal laws.
Rather quickly Solon made a number of democratic changes increasing equality; several, in fact. For one thing, he abolished the aristocratic birth-qualification for political offices, just as the US Framers abolished the religious qualification for political office. That way all Athenian citizens could hold office. He also made it easier for more men to become citizens too, but not women and slaves. They weren’t organized and so were kept out of the reform loop, so to speak. Solon also freed many Greeks from slavery by abolishing personal debts, and he also based the new political system on economic wealth rather than just on aristocratic birth. Thus 4 separate economic classes were created, and to each he gave more political power and thus equalized their rights.
Other reforms soon followed as well. He established one of Western civilization's basic legal ideas: the rule of law, not of birth. All citizens, then, were to be treated equally under the law; wealthy aristocrats would have no special political advantages. Also, to educate Athenians about the laws, he had them written down and publicly posted so anyone could see what they were. He may have gotten the idea on his travels to Iraq. There, in cities like Babylon, laws had been publicly posted more than a thousand years earlier! He also made passing laws more democratic by allowing a simple majority of citizens to overturn or make any law they wished; no super-majorities or obstructive filibusters, just majority rule. Those kinds of obstructive actions were thought of much later by US conservatives as democratic power continued growing stronger in the new nation, and thus threatening conservative power to keep dominating the political process.
Another important reform law deserves mentioning too. Solon also allowed any citizen to sue any other person who broke the law! Equality under the law thus became another important liberal democratic foundation stone in Western civilization. Thus even lowly laborers and artisans could sue wealthy aristocrats if they broke the law.
Solon also created an appeals system where rulings could be judged just or unjust by the entire body of citizens! That was another way he checked the aristocrats' judicial power to rule in their favor. In short, with such political, economic, and judicial baby-step reforms, he set Athens and Western civilization itself on the road to political democracy; many today call him the father of Western democracy. As many liberal Greeks clearly saw, just because someone has aristocratic parents doesn't mean they should automatically have more rights than anyone else, or stop people from working to make life better for everyone.
Why pay so much attention to ancient history? Mainly for 2 reasons. Laws regulate social life itself, and so knowledge about them, and also their fairness, promotes feelings of equality among people. The more equal opportunities people actually have to make a better life for themselves, the more just life itself becomes. As a result, people also began feeling how important obeying good laws makes life more organized and less stressful for everyone. Obviously, respecting just laws isn’t an absolute Truth; sometimes people get away with breaking the law, too often in fact; sometimes breaking the law is justified, like for saving someone’s life; and sometimes unjust laws exist. But in general, writing and then obeying just laws helps make living socially better and less troublesome.
Is it all just ancient history? You be the judge. What about US history over the past 40 years? Like many ancient greedy rich, modern corporate CEOs and rich folks have been freezing salaries, moving businesses to countries with cheaper labor, and thus greatly increasing their profits. The trend began in the 1980s. Then, with those profits, they began building a small army of lobbyists to convince politicians to reduce their taxes, justifying it by telling people they would create more jobs with their money. As many now know, they haven’t! Thus was a kind of class warfare increased, and has become the most recent battle in an on-going class struggle now over 2 thousand years old. The main difference today is money has replaced land as the tool for increasing power, and widespread conservative schools have been made to teach students to obey their teachers and accept what they’re given and do what they’re told, thus making it easier for our modern feudalistic status quo to stay in place. As we’ll see later, university education professors have written a Common Core Standards Initiative many states have already accepted, and with it keep dictating to all students what they should learn and not learn, even if students have no real need for such knowledge! To us Deweyan liberals, then, it’s merely another form of educational slavery.
Today, the liberal educational lessons are obvious. The sooner children start actively learning what those 4 liberal values feel like, by staging and role playing with such values, the sooner they’ll begin feeling what equality is like, rather than merely thinking about what equality is like. And of course, the more that happens, the easier it’ll become to continue producing those feelings when they’re adults, as well as keep learning about the laws their representatives have passed in cities, states, and the nation. To us liberals, that kind of active and holistic learning is sorely lacking in our public schools.
The more students actively role-play in any class, the easier it becomes to more deeply feel what democratic freedom and character excellence are like, and also how they can actively start working to improve their own schools and neighborhoods. So, when they actually start actively experimenting with those kinds of ideas, schools will, no doubt, become much more naturalistic places of learning. As most parents already know, outside of school children normally learn any habit-art by actually practicing it, and feeling what it's like; did you ever hear of a kid learning to roller skate or ride a bike merely by reading about it in a book? Of course not. So why should it be any different with ideas like equality, political control of the economy, or international justice?
For us Deweyan liberals, then, the main problem with our public schools is simply this: conservative book-centered schools regularly expect students to learn history, math, and good citizenship by merely passively reading about them! So, if now you're feeling how weak and unnatural many of our conservative schools are, then I’m doing my job as a Deweyan popularizer! How can anyone improve any system unless they first know its weaknesses? No doubt, sometimes that improvement process will be difficult; what else is new? For thousands of years conservatives have been working day and night to kill liberal democratic, scientific, and equal rights feelings, and almost certainly that situation will not change quickly. But, at the same time, that certainly doesn’t mean such schools can never become a reality. The simple truth is this: the more people are organized to improve any system, and know what they want to experiment with, the easier it becomes.
How many times has the reader played a part in even one scene from history class, or any class? Not only are such active learning events more deeply felt by students, and are a much better way to teach liberal values, but they can also continue increasing all-important student confidence to speak forcefully about basic democratic ideas long before they graduate from high school. And when students get to write their own scenes about such events, they will also increase their writing power as well as keep liberal history alive, vibrant, relevant, and educational.
At present, students in our conservative schools often get no information about such liberal events, much less perform them, or even what laws to respect and how to improve unjust laws. As a result, students have shallow feelings about the power in their own actions and how only they can build behavioral excellence. For us liberal democrats only actions are the engine and fuel of everyone’s psyche. As a result, even high schools graduates often have very weak democratic feelings for equal rights, as well as how important organized democratic power is. Even in high school they’re asked to merely read our federal constitution, in order to pass another standardized test for graduation.
Democratic progress without liberal schools and homes becomes difficult, to say the least. In the 1800s, for example, our public schools almost completely ignored teaching equal rights for women, and so for much of the century a few courageous American women worked peacefully and persistently for about 80 years to educate more people. A few like Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton traveled around the country lecturing, reasoning with, and building a woman's movement BEFORE they actually achieved equal voting rights with the 19th amendment in 1920; democratic might eventually made it right!
The point is, without actually teaching those democratic values in our conservative schools, homes, and churches, that's how long it took to educate enough people to turn mere ideas into political reality. Civil disobedience was another educational tool. When Susan Anthony was arrested and tried for voting in the 1872 national election, it made big headlines across the country. In short, our liberal goal is to keep liberating people from many of their feudal habits and ideas; they're not absolute Truth, they're just habits. Equal marriage rights is merely another example of such liberation. And so again, education about equal human rights remains an important subject; the more young folks learn that liberal democratic value, the easier it’ll be to keep it strong and growing.
Liberal homes, schools, and churches have a very different learning model than conservative ones. With a much more active role playing learning model they can begin feeling more deeply what democratic equality is like and how it can be organized, rather than just read some examples of it. And the more those feelings grow, the more natural it becomes to want to know more about what those in power are doing, like, say, their own principal and event their school board. Current events, rather than merely historical facts, become much more important as a tool for making life more democratically equal and just. What are those in power here and now doing to actually make school a more enjoyable and better learning experience? Some students may even get elected to play a reporter role, and report back to the class, say, once a week, about what’s going on in their own area, as well as maybe even talk about ideas to improve them. That way the very important habit of question-asking grows stronger; what questions should we ask the principal or school board?
Why shouldn’t even 1st graders begin building such skills and knowledge about equal rights with active role playing, and of course the teacher’s help? What’s wrong with actually enjoying what we learn? What better way is there to keep ensuring people in power are acting for the public good, rather than merely supporting the status quo, or worse, making life more feudalistic, slave-like, and stressful? With a more active role playing learning method, children will also start feeling the importance of laws, like bike, skateboard, and pedestrian laws, and later on driving and drug laws as well. Why shouldn’t they also begin feeling how expensive lawyers are when they break the law and even go to school-jail? After all, how can anyone expect students and adults to respect our laws when they don’t even know what the law is, and also feel how much better it is to have the law on your side, rather than against you? Shouldn’t students begin learning, as a general rule, how to respect good and equal laws, and how that makes life easier, less stressful, and more enjoyable?
Knowing how important laws of equality are can also increase the desire for reading; how can students learn what the law is when they can’t it? Even in ancient Athens people began feeling the desire to read. It helped them know what political rights and powers they had, and what laws everyone should respect. Thus reading and writing became an important part of Athenian education, not as an end in itself, but as a way of practicing character excellence in the social world, of preserving their freedom, and promoting social peace and stability. With Pericles' help in the 400s BCE, the world’s first direct democracy was created, where citizens had the equal political power to debate and write the laws they felt worth passing. No doubt, even then it was still a small and restricted democracy, where equal rights were given only to male citizens, but at the time such habits were a great improvement in Athenian life. Best of all, they helped keep socially harmful aristocratic monopolies from becoming too socially dominant and dangerous.
True, such a system of democratic law-making and also hearing court cases didn’t last very long, and didn’t always make the right and intelligent choices, but just the fact of its creation has continued challenging all people to see a democratic system of equal rights was possible and workable.
Celebrating and actively practicing ideas about equal rights in our schools today would certainly help reduce a lot of irrational prejudices still existing about other social minorities. If not, then greedy conservatives and moderates will find it easier to keep molding life to benefit them, rather than a democratic public good. Once political power becomes unequal and controlled by only a small social class, it’s difficult to even want any other system, as ancient, medieval, and even modern history teaches us! In fact, the more such feudalistic power is practiced, the more addictive it becomes; only actions are the engine of all values and habits. We’re seeing that today as conservatives keep working to limit women’s rights, and equal voting rights as well. In fact, as Plato’s political writings and recent modern events show us, for conservatives in general, equality in just about any form is the enemy.
As is now common knowledge today, more than ever before, the wealthy have been using their economic power to keep their largely unequal feudalistic political, economic, and educational status quo not only solidly in place, but growing as well. They continue building a political system which is now spying on people around the world, and is beneficial largely to large corporations, rather than the public good. Thus the US has become a corporate socialism, rather than a democracy. We Deweyan liberals say the best antidote to that system is building more liberal schools where equality if practice, and not just talked about.
How many today realize our liberal idea of equal rights wasn't even celebrated by the US Constitution Framers, and since then the conservative control of public schools has been helping preserve that status quo. In such schools students continue being enslaved to reading mere academic trivia, rather than being free to direct their own learning program, or even learn some useful business skills. As a result, youth unemployment has skyrocketed, thus causing more social stress and frustration. As we’ve seen time and time again, such frustration often results in sheer destruction, mayhem, and sometimes even widespread rioting, as is happening in Egypt and Syria these days. Without students knowing how to intelligently express their feelings and constructively work for improvement, such results will continue being a real danger to people everywhere.
2. Separation of Church and State
No doubt, especially for religious conservatives, that is a bad idea. To them the idea of church-state separation seems harsh and unacceptable, even though it went back to US Framers. In fact today there are many exceptions to it. For example, politicians have been funneling public tax dollars to help support private religious schools. A recent New York Times article by Motoko Rich (6-14-13) stated: “Across the country, states and districts are increasingly funneling public funds to religious schools, private nursery schools, and a variety of community-based nonprofit organizations that conduct preschool classes.” In short, even non-religious taxpayers are being forced to support religious teachings, even though they many disagree with them! It’s yet another example of how an original political idea has been weakened with conservative wealth and funds. If it’s such a good idea, then why not let taxpayers decide how their money should be spent? After all, it’s their money, isn’t it, so shouldn’t they have an equal right to say how it’s spent?
A 2nd important liberal value is the separation of church and state. That idea too goes back to ancient Greek liberals and humanists, like Democritus and Protagoras. For the Atomist Democritus spirits were an unnecessary philosophic idea; they simply made philosophy much more complex than it need be, as Plato was to prove in the 300s BCE! So, for his student Aristotle, god was defined as a non-material being located beyond the stars and merely thinking about its own ideas for all eternity. Then in the medieval world spirit-objects also made the growth of scientific knowledge more difficult and stressful; they were often used to keep people from experimentally learning how nature works, and how to keep improving it.
Before both Plato and Aristotle, liberal Democritus simply used atoms to even define god itself as a being far away and having nothing to do with life here on earth. And for the agnostic humanist Protagoras, the problem was knowing anything for sure about such spirits. He clearly saw the problem: how can anyone know anything about completely non-material objects? Our senses tell us everything we know about the world, and spirit-objects are all non-material! Eventually conservative Plato too admitted openly, he didn’t know how to say anything for sure about such objects.
Why did our framers like Ben Franklin feel such a separation was a good idea? No doubt, the most serious result of spirit-ideas was not being able to prove they existed; thus their reliability just can’t be established. Also, if they exist, they exist in a completely different realm of nature, and so how can they possibly interact with anything material?
But people like Franklin and Thomas Jefferson saw a much more serious social result. Since ancient times many religious conservatives and moderates said only their particular ideas are absolutely True and Certain! And the more people accepted that idea, the more willing they were to defend it with their lives. The long history of religious wars between Christians and Muslims, between Christian sects, and today between Muslim sects and secularists, all dating back to the 400s CE, shows the continuing and dangerous social results of believing only one set of spirit-ideas is absolutely True! Once again, for that idea there is just no objective evidence! And so the obvious question for we liberals is why teach any idea to the next generation which could have no objective evidence?
Given the conservative and moderate assumption of absolute Truth, many other socially obnoxious results continue being produced to this day. For example, for centuries during the Middle Ages Christians have worked to stop all kinds of intelligent experimentation to keep learning about our world; for the Church the Truth was already known, and so there was really no need to learn anything but their own religious kinds of ideas and habits. And that went to everyone! As a result, both science and learning were almost entirely eliminated as people were often forced to believe such ideas.
Also, the more power the Church gained, the more they were motivated to use the political system to make people conform to their ideas and habits. Even today, women’s rights to control their own bodies, as well as same-sex marriage, are just 2 modern examples of such conservative social control based on the idea of absolute Truth. Many religious conservatives today believe a woman should not have the freedom to control her own body, should submit to a higher spirit-authority, and the state should enforce that idea! And of course more than one religion still believes same-sex couples should not have the same freedom and equality to marry as heterosexual couples have. To them it’s against god’s eternal laws, and to secular conservatives it’s against thousands of years of our Western one-man one-woman marriage tradition. They simply choose to conveniently ignore that part of history when polygamy was practiced in many different places, and still is in the Muslim world.
To us liberals these are a few examples of what results can happen when young folks are taught to believe only their religious model of life and nature is eternal Truth, either in schools or at home. So, we simply make no such assumptions about any kind of knowledge, even scientific knowledge! In an always changing world every attempt to accomplish something is seen as merely another experiment; who knows what might happen even if the most reliable scientific ideas are used?
Thus, for us Deweyan liberals, the government should not help any such religion to teach public school students only their ideas of eternal Truth. If someone chooses to practice such habits outside of school, then that’s their choice and freedom, but to use public funds to help teach others such ideas is simply unacceptable to us liberals. Such ideas and habits have been dividing people into different kinds of tribes for thousands of years, and thus making it more difficult for people to feel we’re all just people and belonging to one family, the human family, where everyone deserves equal rights and opportunities if they respect the law. When such a state-religious separating is in place in our public institutions, then everyone become free to choose the religious feelings they feel are best, or even none at all. Dewey himself belonged to the Unitarian church, which works to keep spreading democracy more than anything else. For them, working for the public good and equal rights is the best work for any religion; such actions are sacred, rather than just ideas.
Again, why was the separation of church and state so important to many framers? Many of them simply disagreed with the basic Christian theistic model, and so didn’t assume its religious ideas possessed eternal Truth. Many called themselves Deists, and so rejected theistic ideas of an eternally good, merciful, caring, and powerful god ruling over nature. They simply saw no evidence for it, and many arguments against it, like, for example, the problem of evil. Again, how can anything evil come from an all-good god? And, as we’ve seen already, a deistic idea too went back to ancient liberals like Democritus and moderates like Aristotle. In a world where scientific knowledge and power was still infants, spirits often made people feel life was more hopeful and could become less dangerous if spirits would help those in need. For thousands of years such ideas had been useful.
Framers like Ben Franklin also personally saw some results religious ideas could produce. After inventing the lightening rod, many religious people attacked him for reducing god’s power to punish people. So, to many US Framers a deistic model of god was liberating; it freed them to keep experimenting and learning more about how nature works, how it can be improved, and how a secular government should act. Both Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson agreed; Jefferson even went so far as to write a new gospel, excluding miracles and making it much more secular.
The ancient agnostic humanist Protagoras also preferred separating religion from politics, and thus liberating people to govern themselves democratically, using their logic and reasoning to judge what good results a law might produce. For him, our physical senses tell us everything we know about the world, while spirit-objects are non-physical! What’s more, even after decades of study and meditation even conservative Plato himself admitted openly he didn’t have any certain knowledge about spirit-objects; the best he could do was describe them in mythical language. His Timaeus is such a book. For him people could best justify their spirit ideas with heavenly movements; he believed their regularity could only be explained with the idea of spirits. And for him the sun was the visible result of nature’s highest Spirit-Idea, the Idea of the Good.
However, having said all that, we Deweyan liberals certainly don’t want to forbid students from studying our long and varied religious history if they so choose. On the contrary; students with equal rights should be free to learn more about that history. After all, such ideas and habits have been a part of human evolution for at least 50,000 years! Some early Neandertal burials in Iraq and elsewhere, for example, indicate the belief in an afterlife. So, why shouldn’t that religious history be available to those who want to know more about it; it’s an important part of modern anthropology. Why shouldn’t students have the right to compare and contrast all the different religious ideas, and learn something about their evolution, from widespread primitive animistic and totemic beliefs and habits to today’s over 200 different religious sects? With such comparative religious studies they’ll learn, as a general rule, all primitive societies believed in spirit-ideas and based such ideas on their dreams. Even in ancient times many believed the gods spoke to them through their dreams.
In fact, almost certainly both Neandertals and our H. sapien ancestors felt their dreams were actually a seeing into a spirit-realm, and so somehow a part of us lived on after death. The Greeks called it the psyche, and Christians, Muslims, and Hindus called it the soul. For Plato the idea of an immortal reasoning psyche was sacred. However, with the recent growth of a new and more powerful experimental learning method, focusing on only objective results to justify and verify ideas, such spirit-ideas have been growing much weaker since our Constitution was written. Even centuries before Jesus, Confucius too rejected such spirit-ideas, and he, more than anyone else, helped form the Chinese character itself.
Students in liberal schools should be free to learn how religious ideas were used to give people some real hope for a better life after death in an almost science-free, tense, frustrating, and very dangerous world. For example, both ancient Greeks and Romans regularly killed certain animals in order to ‘see’ what the gods wanted to happen – to read the omens, as they said. And, of course, why shouldn’t students also see how popular obedience to the feudalistic religious status quo was encouraged in religious schools with ritual habits? Such actions built their religious feelings. Students in such schools were taught heaven could only be won within the Church, with god’s grace, including kings and serfs.
Students were also taught to believe a god had personally chosen their political leaders, and so they should be obeyed almost always. To rebel was to endanger their life after death. In such a medieval world religious ideas and habits almost completely dominated the secular government. The Crusades were justified and fought with the help of religious ideas and habits, not to increase the public good and make life safer for everyone.
Clearly, the more young folks are free to begin learning about that religious history, the more they can begin feeling how important experimental learning is today, how only has it been the great liberator of mankind from poverty, disease, and ignorance, but why it’s important to keep the state free from supporting any religion claiming to know absolute Truth. The medieval Church knew how dangerous such comparative religious studies were; they forbade them in their universities, along with many other secular subjects.
Little wonder, then, even in the 1700s many US Framers too felt it wise to separate all such government actions from supporting any religion. They simply wanted to liberate their political creation from domination by any organized religion. Secular law, not religious law, was to be supreme in the US. Putting that idea into practice, however, took some time. Conservative Christians like Alexander Hamilton wanted to make it the national religion. Only fairly recently has the separation between church and state become more a fact of life than just an idea in our public schools. Beginning in the early 1950s, for example, the Supreme Court began ruling all religious prayers should be excluded from public schools. In fact, one 2012 Republican presidential candidate said students should stay away from college because they’ll learn to question all such religious ideas, as if only religious ideas and habits could make people good, honorable, and praiseworthy! To us Deweyan liberals, that is certainly not the case. Excellent ethical habits depend only on excellent ethical actions!
Until very recently a US church-state separation has been only growing stronger. After 1600, as modern experimental science began growing and religious wars kept being fought, the separation of church and state became a much more reasonable idea. Mostly in the Muslim world today it's still an important part of education. Is the devil gaining more control of our world, or are people simply not practicing as many religious habits as before?
Thus, as a result of modern science and its tremendously powerful new experimental learning tool, more people have ceased practicing religious habits and continued weakening feelings for such kinds of truth. Millions today see such ideas as being created for natural and practical reasons, and not because they actually exist in a non-material realm. Also, after reading about all the destructive social results of religious wars in Europe, like the Thirty Years' War in the early 1600s, by the late 1700s our Framers were so convinced of spirit-ideas' potential social dangers they enshrined the separation of Church and State in the first and most important Bill of Rights amendment: the government shall not establish any form of religion. With that idea liberal Western civilization took yet another small baby-step out of the medieval world, where religious law dominated peoples’ lives, politics, and education! At long last, secular law and government was made supreme over religious ideas and action. Even in ancient Greece there wasn’t such a clear separation.
As we've seen, Dewey, like Democritus and Protagoras, was not anti-religious, but he did question how anything could be known about spirit-objects. Humane and helpful religious feelings and actions promoting community feelings and helpfulness still have a very useful social role to play, namely helping people become more intelligent and capable of supporting themselves. That too has been an admirable humanistic part of the religious tradition since primitive times.
As a result, liberals today are challenged to keep using their democratic power to say where the line between church and state should be drawn. Why leave that power to elected representatives when they often vote the way religiously conservative wealthy contributors want them to vote? These days the wealthy has more political and economic power than ever to make people do their bidding. Why shouldn’t people have the right to, say, tax religious property, and if so how much; and also if their tax dollars should be used to help run religious preschools? Again, it’s not written in stone taxpayers should have no say about how their money is spent.
In liberal schools and homes around the world students and parents are now freer than ever to ask such questions. The new liberal educational challenge is simply to keep practicing such habits with our young folks; after all, it’s their tax monies being used to support religious groups! With both comparative religious studies for older students, and with plays and skits for younger students, they can begin feeling such liberal ideas and values, and how important they are for democratic health! Such role-playing can also help students feel how important and useful their own helpful character habits are, whether they’re religious or not. As more and more people are learning these days, one can become a truly honorable and highly respected person without any religious justification or dependence whatsoever!
Liberal Education and Absolute Truth
I’ll offer a few more words about this important religious and philosophic idea. Students in liberal schools should also be free to learn more about the philosophic idea of absolute Truth. The ancient liberal atomist Epicurus too said it’s really never too early or late to begin studying philosophy, and all its ideas. Conservative philosophy and religion celebrates the idea of absolute Truth. In fact, conservative religious feelings about there being one and only one system of religious Truth is still very much alive today, even in the world’s oldest democracy, the US, and even more so in the Muslim world. The conservative control of their schools has kept such ideas a forceful part of life, again with active kinds of practice and learning. Devout Muslims regularly pray 5 times every day, and in Egypt, for example, a Muslim Brotherhood party was voted into power, only recently to be taken from power simply because millions of people didn’t like the social results they were producing. Rarely has such democratic power been seen by so many. In the US too, such feelings of absolute Christian Truth showed their strength as recently as the 2004 elections, when a majority of voters in 11 states rejected the chance to kindly share their marriage rights equally with same-sex couples. With such votes a feudalistic social world dominated by feelings of absolute Truth continues living on, even though Paul of Tarsus said love was the greatest Christian value.
To us liberals, however, those are merely more signs of how weak liberal education still is. If such religious ideas were really eternal Truth, then wouldn’t everyone have discovered it by now? No doubt, people should be free to believe any religious idea they want; that’s the democratic idea of equality. But when politicians use such ideas to deny other law-abiding people their democratic equal human rights and opportunities, then liberals have a philosophic duty to challenge such actions with democratic force, as Egyptians have done yet again.
Thankfully, just recently our Supreme Court answered that democratic challenge in favor of same-sex equal rights. It was a great ruling for liberals everywhere; why should anyone meekly submit to religious-based political discrimination? It simply has no place in a democratic society. Such discrimination based on any idea of eternal religious Truth is simply no longer philosophically acceptable! So, again, the more people believe their own personal religious feelings really reflect some kind of absolute and eternal Truth, then the more difficult it becomes for democratic equal rights to keep growing stronger.
So again, from liberalism’s beginning, then, religious ideas and habits were challenged for their right to dominate people’s lives. And of course, after Charles Darwin published his theories of evolution, many more basic religious ideas and habits were seriously challenged, like biblical creationism for example. There seemed to be a little problem with the time involved. And no doubt in the 1950s such non-religious feelings helped create much conservative hatred for both Russian and Chinese leaders who openly reject them.
From many different sources, then, the idea of absolute religious Truth is becoming much weaker. Why? Again, a much smaller percentage of people today are educated to see the world as Jesus or Gotoma Buddha saw it thousands of years ago. The first saw the world as on the verge of becoming some kind of perfect life, and the second saw it basically as a delusion and something to be ignored. As a result, liberals have become freer to question whether religious ideas of absolute Truth should have any role in a secular government. Indeed, we liberals have enough problems keeping the government from spying on everyone, and collecting information on innocent people. Conservatives know full well, information is the most important commodity there is.
3. Political Control of the Economy
Our 3rd liberal value too is not new, but in the last 40 years it’s become almost impossible to practice in the US, especially on a national level. Why? Basically, a few large, wealthy, and powerful corporations and families have literally taken a dominant control of our political system. How? Well, they're using their wealth to keep our elected representatives dependent on them not only for re-election funds, but also for well-paying jobs when they retire from government! Well over 50% of politicians work for wealthy companies when they retire. Thus, more often than not, campaign contributions help control the way politicians vote.
As a result, it’s been causing a greater amount of social stress and harm, especially since 2007, when the housing market began crashing. Conservative politicians have been talking more about cutting government spending than about creating jobs and helping people get back on their economic feet, so to speak. So, a great challenge today is organizing enough people to focus more of their great democratic power in future elections, and put more progressive liberal politicians into office. Such politicians simply aren’t afraid to tell our powerful corporations their political control should be ended with merely one constitutional amendment: all national elections shall be publicly funded! Such an amendment will finally liberate our representatives from being dominated by our wealthy upper class. Plato called it rule by an oligarchy or wealthy, and even for him it was much less than the best kind of government. Until such an amendment is passed, economic control of our political system, and its access to more and more tax-based public wealth, will continue making life more stressful and difficult for all but the already wealthy!
Economic History for Liberal Schools
Sadly, economic history as well as current events are almost non-existent in our public schools. It's a shame; Dewey felt it was one of the most useful studies of all. As we’ve already seen above, political control of the economy is certainly not a new idea. Even ancient Greeks like Solon in the 500s BCE felt the government should help the lower classes live better by taking some economic power away from the wealthy class and sharing it with others. He told the wealthy to erase personal debts, so more would be free to live the lives they wanted. He knew if it didn’t happen, then the wealthy would simply keep increasing their own social power, limiting others’ wealth, and thus keep increasing more social stress.
Even his conservative descendant Plato knew how dangerous uncontrolled wealth could be to the public good. He wrote: “… Excess of … wealth and property … breeds public and private feuds and faction, defect, subjection. Let no man covet wealth for his children’s sake, that they may leave them in opulence; it's not for their own good nor for the state’s.” Such thoughts reflect how even conservative Plato liberated himself from wealth’s addiction to controlling political actions. Unfortunately, today too many voters remain largely unorganized and unfocused, and thus continue allowing such a situation to flourish and grow. Thus, it's become much more difficult to change a political system dominated by wealth and corporate power. So again, people should feel how creating a publicly funded re-election system would greatly improve life, not only in the world’s oldest democracy but in all political systems. Greed can be addictive.
In fact, an ancient and medieval kind of economic class warfare for political dominance continues to this day. Today the richest 1% is said to have earned 93% of income growth in the entire year of 2010; the wealthiest 10%’s portion of the nation’s income has gone up 17% in the last 60 years; and public college costs have more than doubled as a percent of family income, from 12% to 26% in the last 40 years! (Washington Post, 6-13-12) In short, as such events and US econoomic history shows, since the republic was founded, the rich have continued growing richer and the poor poorer. As in ancient Greece, a politically uncontrolled economic system tends to build stronger and stronger monopolistic power, control more and more wealth, and thus make it easier to destroy normal market forces of supply and demand. The less competition business people have, the better they like it. Huge oil companies, for example, can charge just about anything they want for gas, merely by manipulating their refineries.
In fact, capitalism’s economic founder Adam Smith said banks too should be closely regulated by the government. He wrote in his famous Wealth of Nations: “If bankers are restrained from issuing (money) … for less than a certain sum … their trade may, with safety to the public, be rendered … perfectly free. The multiplication of banking companies … increases the security of the public. It obliges all of them to be more (careful) in their conduct … the failure of any one company … becomes of less consequence to the public.” (emphasis my own) Fine words, but when the wealthy control much of the political system, then what chance have they of becoming reality?
In short, Smith himself saw how dangerous to the public good unrestricted and uncontrolled banking was, and so said they should be well regulated by the government! Sadly, such sound political advice has been all but ignored in the US, except for a few decades after the Great Depression, when bank were much better regulated. Within the past 30 years, however, both Republicans and Democrats have continued de-regulating them largely because wealthy bankers have been contributing to their re-elections. As a result, they've all helped create yet another very serious challenge to economic stability for millions of people. How bad has it become? Well, millions have recently lost their jobs and their homes, the public debt has grown enormously as politicians used public money to relieve reckless banks of their losses from risky investments, and conservatives have continued stopping the government from helping those who are still unemployed.
Currently, both China and Russian are experimenting with a different kind of economic system. In them the government appoints its own people to their corporate boards of directors; some have called it state capitalism. In the US, however, stockholders elect boards of directors, and the more stock people own, the more votes they have. Karl Marx too said the greedy upper class should be controlled politically, or else their eternal quest for more and more profits will continue making social life more and more stressful for everyone else. Already in the US, a few powerful oil, banking, and insurance companies can keep setting their rates higher and higher, regardless of what other smaller companies are doing! Thus, they can keep increasing the value of the stock they own, and also keep paying both lobbyists and politicians to keep their monopolistic status quo power in place! Ancient Athens probably never had such a socially harmful and destructive economic system. There, people were simply more democratically organized, and could thus more easily demand and get some improvements than we can today.
Like powerful religious organizations in the Middle Ages, concentrated corporate wealth and greed today can be a very socially damaging force. For example, within the past few decades about 50,000 factories have simply been shipped overseas to cheaper labor markets, thus increasing corporate profits even more, creating greater unemployment here at home, and also making it easier for conservative politicians to tell us the government is spending too much money on retirement and medical services. No doubt, the economic sector wants a much bigger slice of those funds. Also, what many people don’t often realize is wealth-friendly politicians have greatly lowered taxes on the superrich and corporations from what they were in the 1970s. As a result, our public debt has skyrocketted! Well, if nothing else such conservative talk it’s certainly creative propaganda. After all, the more people think about our national debt, the more difficult it is to notice how the wealthy are using the government to keep getting richer, and the more difficult it becomes to organize democratic power and restore political control over our powerful corporations and wealthy families through higher taxes. How many billions does one family or corporation need? To us liberals, such economic power and dominance are yet more real evidence proving our point: unrestricted capitalism leads to economic monopoly and political corruption and enslavement. Thus life becomes more difficult for everyone but the wealthy.
Thus, the educational challenge for us liberals is simply to start teaching even primary age students more about our economic system, and how concentrated wealth can make life less than satisfying. With active and creative role-playing with skits teachers help write, as well as more economic games like Monopoly, even young students can begin seeing how an intelligent control of our economy benefits everyone, not just the wealthy. That’s yet another great democratic challenge for parents, teachers, and students today. What about creating a game called Washington, D.C., where students can play different kinds of roles, like lobbyist, politician, and corporate head, and thus start learning how the government actually works? Unless students in the next generation begin seeing how destructive an uncontrolled economy can be, then the more difficult life will become.
The more such useful learning happens in our schools, the easier it'll be for adults to support more progressively liberal representatives who will help build more liberal schools where such economic facts and history are a major study! For we liberals, the very health of our democracy depends to a large extent on such schools and subjects! By the time they're out of school, just making a living and raising a family becomes too distractive and energy-draining for most people to pay much attention to politics, thus making it easier for conservatives to keep their hold on the political system.
Strange as it may seem, even ancient conservative and moderate Greeks like Plato and Aristotle said as much too. For Plato, the ruling guardian class shouldn’t even think about or have money, much less work to keep increasing theirs, and for Aristotle the more wealth is monopolized by one class, the greater the chances of violent revolution itself. He knew people can only be pushed and pressured so much before they begin hitting the streets, as our recent Occupy Movement showed us, as well as Egyptian protestors too. After all, in the almost democratic-free ancient and medieval worlds, violence was often the only way to change such powerful economic dominance.
To their great benefit the Church too downplayed economic money-making during the Middle Ages; they forbade loaning money out as interest. As a result many Jews turned to banking and loaning money to make their living and a profit for their Christian investors, and so many looked down on them. Anti-Semitic ‘Shakespeare’ expressed his Jewish hatreds in The Merchant of Venice. Eventually, however, as business opportunities continued increasing after 1,000 CE, the political system began allowing money-making opportunities for businesspeople to keep increasing their own wealth. And, with the Protestant Reformation, wealth and profit-making finally became religiously justified and encouraged. To become wealthy was often seen as a sign of god's grace! Then later, in the 1700s, Adam Smith’s famous laissez-faire economic model also justified money-making, but only in a competitive world, where monopolies weren’t allowed to grow dominant and controlling. For him too, the government has a right and duty to keep the economic playing field competitive and fair! If not, then the people would continue being exploited by those who had built working monopolies and could charge their customers whatever they wanted for their goods and services, just like ancient landowners used debt to keep increasing their land holdings. In short, for us Deweyan liberals, intelligently regulating the economy by elected representatives is best for the public good.
Early in US history, however, conservatives like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay said flatly, those who own the country ought to run the country! I've never seen a better example of conservative economic philosophy than that, and it's not only still alive and well to this day, but growing more powerful as well! And US history also teaches us, for much of the time conservatives have even dominated our political system, including the Supreme Court. Before senators were elected by the people, rich folks had themselves appointed to the senate where they could easily control who was appointed to the court, and who wasn't. One result was the infamous Lochner Court of the late 1800s and early 1900s; it corporate lawyers regularly ruled in favor of big corporations and against labor and workers; they seldom saw a monopoly they didn't like. And even more recently, the government has continued supporting the financial sector with hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars handed over to bankers who over-invested in risky and dangerous home mortgages, making themselves vulnerable to bankruptcy and creating another Great Depression!
In short, with such economic power today enclosed within a few very large banks, corporations, about 30,000 wealthy families, investment firms, and insurance companies, 2 liberal practices have become more important than ever before. One is to start building more liberal schools and homes where young folks can begin feeling such economic reality. And secondly, for voters to get more organized and educated about electing representatives to more intelligently regulate our economic sector, so they can better increase equal rights and opportunities for everyone. Such liberal schools will stop distracting students from learning such economic facts with often useless academic trivia, and start teaching the economic reality happening here and now. In fact, for us liberals, such schools, homes, and churches are the best insurance against the continual onslaught of wealthy conservatives and their army of lobbyists.
More Current Economic Events
Still not convinced we need such schools to keep improving the public good? Is building such schools, homes, and churches really too difficult a task? Not at all. In them students simply begin learning how, in the US, the liberal idea of government economic control began increasing in Republican Teddy Roosevelt's progressive administration (1901-1908), thanks to a new, powerful, and popular Progressive Movement! And on the education side Dewey was the nominal head of the Progressive Education movement.
Beginning after the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution had quickly produced a small number of really wealthy people, dubbed the Robber Barons by the press. At first the conservative Lochner Court often ruled against Teddy breaking up monopolies, or trusts as they were called, but eventually in the 1930s the Court became more sympathetic to all the millions then living hand-to-mouth during the Great Depression. Thus uncontrolled conservative money-making mania became less dangerous as Teddy's distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt got the power to better regulate banks and insure their deposits; he was the Solon of the 1900s. And, with Dewey's help, a wave of progressive schools were built around the country, hundreds in fact.
End of story? If you think yes you haven't been reading very well. After World War 1, for example, much of the country's progressive energies were deflated, and Republicans once again allowed government economic controls to weaken in the 1920s. That proved to be yet another fatal mistake, as the stock market frenzy and crash in 1929 shows; what followed was dubbed the Great Depression in the 1930s. When the market crashed millions of people lost their life savings while a few made many millions, John F. Kennedy's father Joseph being one of them. He was smart enough to sell his stock before it crashed and made about $300 million.
However, that liberal progressive kind of energy was quickly revived in the 1932 election; Franklin Roosevelt gained enough political power to pass some intelligent controls of the economy, just like Adam Smith had recommended, and also create some federal jobs programs. Just a few important new laws were helpful. One separated savings banks from high risk investment banks, so peoples' savings would be better protected. At first the conservative Supreme Court ruled against many such government programs, but with different Justices it became more sympathetic to all the millions of people who were on the edge of starvation. Thus, uncontrolled corporate money-making mania became less dangerous as banks were better regulated and deposits were insured.
More recently, however, since 1980, with their campaign funds conservatives have been convincing politicians to de-regulate our economic sector once again. Needless to say, the more such intelligent regulations were overturned, the closer we moved to our present serious and deep recession, where unemployment remains a serious problem.
Like anything else, wealth too can become addictive, especially for those who feel they have a natural right to get all they can. In the early 1970s, for example, with the country distracted by the Vietnam War, conservative business people began focusing on making the economic sector less regulated, and thus better able to make even more money. And, without schools teaching such economic events, such changes were easy. After all, what else have the greedy rich to do but keep getting free of government economic regulations, making it easier to keep making as much money as they can, just as drug addicts do anything they can to keep feeding their drug habit, even sometimes committing murder.
In the 1980s, then, with the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan, Republicans openly declared war on government economic regulations. Government, Reagan confidently told the American public, is not the answer for our economic mess; government is the problem causing it. No doubt a collective cheer went up all over Wall Street. For them indeed, happy days were here again.
Within just the past few decades a small army of lobbyists were hired to keep pressuring politicians to end such lawful and stabilizing banking regulations, and of course donating money to campaigns for those who agreed. And the more that happened, the closer we moved to our present serious, deep, and on-going recession, huge national debt, and millions losing their jobs and homes. And on top of that, when the housing market crashed in 2007, millions in bonuses were paid to investment bankers and CEOs as reward for selling mortgages to people who knew they couldn't pay for them, and other financial products even the sales people didn't know how they worked!
The new millennium has been an economic disaster both in the US and around the world. Republican President Bush 2 started 2 highly questionable and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also cutting taxes on top of it! As a result, public debt has exploded to over $15 Trillion dollars, give or take a buck or 2, and costing jobs as unregulated corporations shipped some 50,000 factories overseas. And as if all that wasn't bad enough, millions of people are now being asked by conservative politicians to live more austere lives on less income while the richest 1% continues living like kings and royalty. With our rich-favored tax system some super-rich folks and corporations are paying less in income tax than the secretaries who often run the corporations!
Such are merely a few of the terribly disastrous social results possible when disorganized voters don't demand the government intelligently regulate the economic sector. And, even worse, the more that happens, the more demoralized people may feel, fatalistically thinking nothing can be done to improve the system. Such defeatist feelings are not only poison to any democratic system, even the world’s oldest, but are exactly the feelings greedy rich folks want people to feel! It makes controlling even more of the public’s money even easier for them, while helping draw state voting districts to favor Republicans, rather than Democrats!
In ancient Greece, liberal Sophists weren’t afraid to tell it like it is, so to speak. In very plain language they described such power economics: the powerful will keep working to control the government, and thus create their own models of social excellence and justice; only their economic might makes it right!
When more of our schools, homes, and public media not only begin teaching young folks this kind of economic and political history, not with just reading but also with active kinds of games and role playing, then the better prepared they'll be for living in a world where a few greedy wealthy folks can keep making life more stressful, difficult, and even miserable for millions of people. Again, if such ideas and feelings aren't taught in our homes, schools, churches, and over our public air waves, then we’ll continue seeing a wealth-dominated feudalistic political and economic system remain firmly in place, meaning of course a government of, by, and for the wealthy! The more students are taught such liberal ideas and feelings, the easier it'll be for our government to put and keep intelligent controls of the economy in place. And the easier it'll be to finally liberate our elected representatives from the wealthy's gripe with public financed elections, thus making them freer to keep working for the public good!
Granted, much of our political and economic systems are now rigged to benefit the wealthy more than anyone else, but to us Deweyan liberals it’s all the more reason to continue organizing the most intelligent antidote to such greedy conservative power: people and student power! With it not only will it become easier for our politicians to gain more economic freedom from the money-hoarders, but also to start building the best institution against them: liberal schools where the next generation continues learning about what’s going on here and now both politically and economically. Many conservatives now sense the danger with such schools, and so continue working to keep the conservative educational status quo as firmly in place as they can. Here's yet another interesting political fact: about 80% of congress people become much better paid lobbyists when they leave congress; it's where the real corporate money is.
We Deweyan liberals say even in primary classrooms students can begin seeing and feeling how having only one unregulated business, say, a cookie seller, can make everyone’s life more stressful and selfish by being able to raise prices whenever it wants! They can also begin feeling, through role playing, how unelected feudalistic corporate boards of directors can make decisions aimed at increasing their own wealth, rather than sharing such wealthy and increasing the public good. And students can also begin feeling how just having an equal number of workers on those boards makes it easier to better share their corporate profits with the workers. After all, they're the ones who made such wealth and profit possible! Where is it written in stone corporate CEOs should make more than 300 times what their workers make? Don’t such practices help build a wealthy aristocratic class rather than a democracy? Why shouldn't even 3rd graders begin learning the names of our huge monopolistic corporations, like Exxon-Mobile, General Electric, Shell Oil, Boeing Aircraft, and also what they're doing in our world today? Shouldn't they also start learning to ask what they're doing with all the billions they make each year, while many kids are going to bed hungry? To us liberal Deweyans, this kind of education is not communist propaganda, but rather merely learning what life can be like in a democracy focused on building equal rights and opportunities for all.
It's obvious, our democratic form of government continues challenging people to start building such schools. They're the best social weapon against all still-existing feudalistic organizations and people who love to dominate others. As many have recently seen, bankers told people they had some great investments for them, and they turned out to be yet more schemes for taking their money. Sure, a few salespeople went to jail, but many more continue counting their millions; to many people, enough money is always just a little bit more. To us liberals, however, such greed is a sickness, just like alcoholism and drug addiction. In reality, such conservatives will keep using the government to keep making the world they want. The latest wave of abortion and voting restrictions in many states are a perfect example of them saying one thing – we should have small government – and then using the government to pass the laws they say are best. For the past 200 years wealthy folks in the US have continued growing wealthier and more powerful, just like the military did in the ancient world, and the Church did in the medieval world! As a result, however, democratic habits weren't taught.
If, however, young primary-age students can set up lemonade stands in the summer, then why can’t they also set up bank and cookie businesses in their classrooms, and start feeling how everyone benefits when class government intelligently regulates what they do. Why shouldn’t even 4th and 5th graders begin learning more about setting up public banks which work for the good of all students? In fact, that kind of banking system may be on the verge of blossoming in many other states besides North Dakota, where one is already working for the public good, and not just for more and more profits. It’s definitely a current movement parents and adults should know about and also eagerly support as much as possible.
With liberal school banks even in primary school, students can not only start learning how public banks work for the public good, but also learn more about useful mathematical ideas and skills, like interest rates and how to get a loan. Will their interest rates fall if kids don't want their cookies any more? And later on perhaps wonder why all public employees’ salaries shouldn't automatically go down when tax revenues go down? Otherwise, some workers will remain vulnerable to more unemployment and economic hardship. After all, if housing and car loans in the real world are 2 of our economy’s most important financial actions, then shouldn’t students start learning about them in public school, with actions like applying for bike loans, so they'll be vulnerable to being cheated and exploited later on, as millions were before 2007! Millions today are politically psyched-out, as it were; their political fight has gone out of them, mainly because our conservative public schools never encouraged them to build such intelligent habits in the first place.
Parents and students have the power to get better organized in their own neighborhoods and start demanding their schools start teaching more liberal and progressive ideas, habits, and feelings, so kids will be much better prepared for life in the real world. After all, they’re the ones paying for their schools. Who might object to building such schools? Would you be surprised if I said colleges and universities? After all, they would be losing many more of their potential clients, wouldn't they?
In a nation where watching our political system closely is not a strong widespread habit, voters ignore flooding Congress with calls of protest and threats to throw them out of office at the next election if they keep ignoring their responsibility to better regulate the economic sector! Without that kind of focused democratic power, high level politicians will keep getting well-paying corporate jobs when they leave office, and so keep encouraging others to serve wealthy interests! In truth, we get the government we the people keep allowing to exist. How many people realize democracy is an ACTIVE political system? The more active people are at learning what's happening here and now, the better the government will work for them. I redd the other day, wealthy Greek millionaires are now investing heavily in London real estate, even though poor Greeks are standing in bread lines!
The situation is serious, but certainly not hopeless. If it was, then there would be no progress at all! The keys, once again for we liberals, is to both start teaching our young folks about such economic realities, and start electing more liberal politicians! The poor might always be with us, but isn't that true largely because the greedy rich are always with us?
Economic studies are almost non-existent in our conservative public schools, and even if they are taught it's usually to high school seniors with rather conservative books. So, until more parents, students, and teachers become more educationally active, that situation will probably never change. The more uneducated the public is, the better conservatives like it. Only when enough people begin demanding their schools start teaching some real useful economic knowledge, and how an intelligently regulated economy works better for everyone's good, will a more democratically equal world continue growing stronger!
4. International Justice
Finally, the 4th idea of international justice is also an ancient liberal idea, but today it’s becoming more important than ever before in our rapidly shrinking and interactive world. For one thing, corporate lawyers often meet in secret to write trade treaties between nations, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the current Trans-Pacific Partnership act, the TPP. Early reports about the results of the TPP are even more alarming than NAFTA results. Such treating are so beneficial to corporations they are often just rammed through congress on what's called a Fast Track. As a result, however, the all-important results of them aren't even democratically debated or exposed, and so it's yet another way conservatives make life much more dangerous and stressful for ordinary workers around the world, and not just in the US. So, teaching the next generation about such international corporate actions is essential for our world becoming more just and democratic, rather than feudalistic. International economics is already more developed than international politics. Thus, again, far too many of our young folks are graduating from high school with almost no knowledge of the international world around them and how it is working.
For us liberals, international justice too is not a new idea. In ancient Greece liberal Democritus wanted international relations based on equality between peoples, rather than treating other nations as merely barbarian, uncivilized, and something to be taken advantage of for, say, their natural resources or cheap labor.
Also, with international inequality and injustice, war itself becomes more likely. With such useful and practical knowledge in our public schools it would have been much easier, say, for more people in the 1960s to ask what real dangers the Vietnamese posed to us, and why we should be causing millions to lose their lives, millions more to be maimed, and billions of taxpayer dollars given to weapons' makers in the process? Instead, students and people unaware of international current events were easily persuaded Vietnam must be prevented from getting an evil communist government at all costs. They weren’t educated to see they were merely fighting for their own independence and self-determination! Our military-industrial complex convinced naive President Johnson we could quickly dominate the country, and at first an obedient public went along with it.
No doubt, in the ancient world such ideas about international equality and justice sounded rather new and even radical to conservatives like Plato. Many nations, including Greece and Israel, normally looked down on other cultures, as being either not as sophisticated or more sinful and thus harmful. Even the New Testament records how Jesus told his disciples not to go into Gentile houses, feeling they were already polluted.
Centuries earlier the atomist Democritus freed himself from all such feelings during his many travels. On them it was easy to see all people as merely having different habits and customs, not worse ones, and so should be treated as equals, rather than enemies. And with the growth of more business arts and evolution science in the 1800s, it became much easier to see Democritus and his follower Epicurus was much more modern than just about anyone else! After all, we're all just people with different social and cultural habits, so why not learn to treat each other fairly, rather than as merely someone conquer, enslave, and exploit for their wealth and resources? Aren't the results of such equality really better for everyone, even the greedy wealthy?
Again, such ideas about international equality can begin growing on a primary school level with more active role playing. The more students dress up and learn about people from different countries, the easier it is for them to begin feeling how international fairness and equality are the most intelligent way to treat others. If games like Monopoly, for example, can help educate young folks about how to keep wealth balanced and distributed, then why can't games be invented like, say, International Justice, where students can begin feeling what it's like to do business justly, rather than exploit and endanger the lives of people in other countries? Better yet, why shouldn't student teams be asked to create an exciting game of International Justice, where drone attacks, clothing factories, military arms sales, and social repression are all a part of the game? Indeed, once the conservative educational model of teaching academic trivia is seen as far from the best one, then a whole new world of educational experiences can begin opening up even for primary-age students, a world they will soon be entering. As the saying goes, fore warned is fore armed, and the more they know about that world as it is now, the less vulnerable they'll be in it!
Our liberal idea of international justice and equality remains a teaching challenge in our public schools. Without knowing some of the ways nations interact and produce dangerous results, like selling more guns, tanks, and aircraft from Russia and the US, the more difficult it becomes to promote more peaceful and constructive ways of living. In Syria these days, other countries are selling guns to different groups, and thus making it more difficult for opposing factions to start talking intelligently to each other about sharing power, rather than demanding only one sect keep it for themselves.
So, without learning feelings about international equality, and the better social results it produces, the easier it is to keep allowing our corporations, military, and government to keep endangering everyone's well-being. Such unequal actions on the US’s part have helped make our government one of the most hated around the world. Such selfish, profit-obsessed actions only make life more difficult for everyone. And, it’s easier for people in the US to believe sheer propaganda about certain nations being evil, thus making it easier to keep fighting war after war just because they might be a threat to our economy and security.
Recently, as more people have become aware of how much our government is ignoring the Constitution's 4th amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures, the phrase 'National Security' has become a political favorite, just like communist hatred was used in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Both ideas are often used to keep people unnecessarily fearful! Ignoring international ideas of equality and justice in the 1960s enabled the government to create one of the US's worst tragedies, the Vietnam War, as well as the worst tragedy: the almost complete annihilation of our native peoples. All of those tribes have yet to recover fully from people allowing our government to see them as merely people to dominate, rather than to intelligently and kindly interact with on a business level for everyone's benefit.
Such ignorance about international equality allows real dangerous events to keep unfolding even today, even after millions were killed and tragically maimed in the Vietnam War. And making matter even worse, today many corporations are working peacefully with the Vietnamese to make our overpriced clothes and shoes. How much good will are we building around the world when our corporations are allowed to pay foreign workers pennies an hour, when their work is then sold here for huge profits? Such injustices could become less dangerous when students know more about values of international equality and justice. In short, liberal education aims squarely at teaching parents and students to act more intelligently about what our powerful corporations are doing in the world here and now. In reality the Vietnamese had been fighting with China for its independence for only about 2,000, and so only wanted to keep their independence; who should send over 50,000 young Americans to die for that cause?
I realize many may feel all 4 of these liberal values are really out of place and irrelevant in a book about educational excellence, but to us liberals such subjects are essential for building a more just and democratic world for everyone! It's essential if we the people are to first take a more intelligent control of our government and its economy, and then keep it from being used by greedy folks to merely keep increasing their own wealth while more and more people around the world come to hate and despise us. As one famous liberal actor once said, above all else peace! And that is best achieved when all peoples are treated as equals.
8. More About Dewey's Learning Model
On Dewey’s liberal learning plateau excellent education focuses on teaching all students how to intelligently use creative and active experimental actions to learn whatever they want to study, as long as it’s lawful and helpful. After all, what's the sense in teaching students a lot of book-facts without also teaching them how to intelligently use those facts experimentally to make life better both for themselves and their community? For us liberal Deweyans that democratic learning model is indeed better than typical conservative ones; it builds democratic habits, rather than status quo acceptance. Such liberal schools and homes help students become better connected to both themselves and their communities, and also teach students how they intelligently keep working to improve both. Conservative schools, on the other hand, aim mainly at teaching students how to get a good grade on the next subject test or standardized test. But, for us, what’s the sense of students learning to read and then not helping enrich the lives of, say, sheltered senior citizens?
Conservative and Liberal Teachers
As we've already seen, there's thus a rather large difference between liberal and conservative teachers. Here’s an example of education history not many young teachers read about. It’s a fine example of how even some college professors like to control their students and teach only what they think is important. As much as some conservatives like to say colleges are really run by a liberal educational group, believe it or not some are just as conservative as some Supreme Court Justices.
In his autobiography the great American writer Upton Sinclair told a story about a college English professor he once had while he was a student at New York's Columbia University in the 1890s. One day the professor, feeling frustrated and angry about Sinclair’s writing, told the youngster his work was terrible. For one assignment it may have been, but little did the professor know Sinclair had been making good money writing for some years already! Eventually the professor came to see more of his work and how good it was.
So, swallowing his pride he asked Sinclair for suggestions about making his own writing class better. Sinclair told him students should be encouraged to write about anything they wanted, so long as it interested them. That way students would become more emotionally involved in their work, making it more meaningful and enjoyable. With that advice, however, he could almost see the professor’s disappointment. To him it was a bad idea; he said students would write only about football and fraternities.
Here, however, it might be helpful to remind all conservative book-centered ‘educators’ of an important philosophic fact: any idea about our infinitely large universe, from the Big Bang to atoms, can be reached from any other idea! In other words, our entire universe is interconnected, making it an organic whole rather than a collection of separate and independent objects. So, whatever a student may write about, it can become the doorway to any other truth the teacher might want to talk about. As Dewey would say, nature is a continuum. In short, any part of our intellectual universe can be entered into and explored from ANY OTHER IDEA WHATSOEVER! Football ideas, for example, can act as a doorway to, say, the philosophy of athletics, and the sociology of crowd behavior, to the religious and ethical ideas of athletes!
Any idea can lead to any other idea, no matter how seemingly separate and different! Nature is not a pyramid structure, like Plato and Aristotle liked to picture it. It's an interconnected whole. Liberal teachers and parents feel that idea, and so can easily help students feel that kind of organic connectedness. It's what makes poetry such an interesting art form; words can act as metaphors comparing different parts of nature; have you seen the light?
So, teachers can give students a feeling for our natural continuum simply by asking questions connecting 2 seemingly separate objects: How does watching a football game affect peoples' feelings about life? With a little creative question-asking on the teacher’s part, even Einstein's Theory of Relativity can be entered into from, say, a student writing about how different people see different football or fraternal events! Their answers are relative to their own habits. And from there it's merely a small baby-step to one of philosophy's greatest questions: what is truth? Is it a collection of truths, like Dewey said, or is it the grasping of eternal and unchanging objects, like Plato and Aristotle said? That’s how porously organic and interconnected the entire mental universe is! Whatever a student writes about can become the doorway to our entire universe of ideas and feelings!
Thus, to us liberals it seems obvious to ask: why should any teacher fear allowing students to write about anything they want? Why shouldn't any teacher give students the freedom to explore any idea or feeling? Can't even hateful writing be used to help build more constructive and positive feelings? Can’t even fraternity actions and sporting events lead to genuine ethical questions and insights about life if teachers ask those kinds of intelligent questions? After all, isn’t all good education really a process of expanding and civilizing one’s feelings about life and nature?
Don’t look now but football, or any sport, can help students focus on other more important ideas, like ethical ideas, health, drug-use, and even philanthropic ideas. For example, are 350 pound football players in better health and condition than all 99 pound weaklings? What really makes someone an excellent football player? Young folks often have rather narrow ideas about life, and so they should be asked such questions and begin seeing how ideas can be connected; how else are one's personal ideas of truth built? What, for example, would life look like if we lived at an atom's nucleus? How else can student consciousness and wisdom possibly keep growing and deepening unless their narrow and shallow ideas and feelings are broadened and deepened with some intelligent questions? In fact, doesn't all good art reflect nature's marvelous interconnectedness?
So, again we come to another important educational question: Shouldn’t our schools, homes, and churches become more student-centered, rather than book centered? How can we expect students to start enjoying school and learning unless they have the freedom to express their emotions and feelings, rather than learning what someone else says they should learn? For us Deweyans, is there any better way to keep students of all ages interested in learning, staying in school, and building their own feelings of self-esteem and confidence other than giving them such freedom of expression? Even writing about ice cream can become to doorway to our entire economy! Besides, as our high dropout rates are showing us, many students simply don't want to stay in a place where they're enslaved to learning what they don’t need or want to learn! Isn’t that what makes work so boring to millions of people, if they can find a job at all? And yet our conservative schools are set up on much the same model: we know what you should learn, and if not then you’ll fail. These days it’s called the Common Core State Standards model, but for us Deweyan liberals it's merely another conservative educational system, keeping students yoked to their book and learning more abstract knowledge and facts.
Perhaps worst of all, we say such a conservative educational model goes against the very idea of democracy and free choice – everyone has a right to seek happiness in their own way, as long as it’s safe and legal. Even high school students are herded into huge schools and given schedules of where to go at what time to read about different subjects many often care little about. How many students would never take algebra and geometry if it wasn't required? What's more, that idea can be tested. Just give public school students the freedom to choose what they want to learn and see how much of the Common Core Academic Standards they choose.
Furthermore, such slavery creates a host of so-called disciplinary problems! And, eventually many students begin realizing tax money their schools get depends on merely the number of students in school, rather than helping them learn what they need for life outside of school, and for how to become a more intelligent, excellent, and connected person! After all, mere attendance is how legislators determine how much tax money schools should get. So, shouldn’t more parents, teachers, and students be asking themselves how many times anyone needs to know how to add or multiply 2 mixed numbers, or know the difference between a gerund and an infinitive? How many even remember what a mixed number or gerund is? And yet young students may spend many weeks and months learning about them. Shouldn’t many more people begin realizing such a conservative academic learning model actually adds to our already very high unemployment levels for those under 25, being around 50% these days, and thus also increases the chances for experimenting with illegal activities as well! Wealthy students, however, don't have to worry about getting a job; their parents can well afford college costs.
Perhaps the saddest part of our generally acknowledged educational failure is this: both Democrats and Republicans seem to want absolutely no part of such an educational debate between liberals and conservatives! Both often act to promote the conservative educational status quo; they want conformity to a basically medieval educational model, where children are given the facts to learn, are expected to obey their teachers, and where becoming connected to their communities was ignored in favor of preparing oneself for the next life. Many teachers and administrators today still want to keep students in their seats silently reading about generally useless ideas, and then answering book-questions day after day and year after year.
Recently, a news report celebrated the fact California Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed a student to be on the California Board of Education. That’s progress, isn’t it? Is it? Well, I for one felt like booing both of them when the students started talking about how important the Common Core State Standards are for all students! The debate we liberals want asks the question: Is that model educationally excellent? Then I thought about the financial reality behind such events: teacher unions are a big supporter of Governor Brown, and many of them certainly don’t want their book-centered jobs endangered with talk about Dewey’s liberal model of education, where real democratic choice in learning is practiced even at the primary level, and where learning becomes an active, intelligent, individual, and experimental affair.
A Few More Liberal Educational Ideas
We say such liberal schools have a different role for both teachers and students. The more students are connected to their communities and continue learning as they help improve them, then the stronger a democratic spirit becomes. How might that process begin? Well, students at the beginning of each year, say, even in the primary grades, might watch videos about useful professions and trades involved in helping others on a social level, everything from plumbers and carpenters to bankers, athletes, police officers, and politicians? No doubt, every child won't want to become a doctor, lawyer, or rocket scientist, but whatever they do choose to learn more about, there’ll be an emotional commitment to the learning process, and thus make school something else besides a rather boring psychic enslavement. And best of all, after that emotional commitment is made on the student’s part, then they can begin improving their own character habits making all those professional people excellent, rather than just ordinary.
For example, don't both excellent carpenters and doctors know some basic healthy habits like diet, exercise, and honesty? And more importantly, with learning more about those skills they can also begin learning about learning itself! It’s called the psychology of learning. What’s the best way to learn about excellent habits, what role do rewards play in that process, and what’s the best way to practice? Each student is different, and so each needs to learn how they best learn. Again, a whole world of useful facts and ideas can begin opening up in such schools where children are liberated from being yoked to their text books day after day! They can also begin learning about ethically excellent character habits too, like honesty and respect, not only for others, but for themselves as well. Such character habits make one’s life that much more socially desirable. People will simply want their services more often if they’re honest and respectful.
Such schools will definitely not look like our conservative schools today, where students must be in a classroom and seated for so many minutes and then go to another class and be seated and quietly work. Said another way, it's the difference between life in the business world and life in the regimented military world. Just as in the real business world, liberal schools give students more freedom to learn what they want. And, if liberal schools are experimentally built carefully and slowly, one grade at a time, so students learn what academic freedom feels like and how to use their time intelligently, then educational chaos and so-called discipline problems will be much less of a problem. When are students a problem when they're learning what they want to learn, again, as long as it's safe and legal?
Also, in time, older students will be better able to help younger ones focus on learning such intelligent habits, like defining better what they want to learn about, making a plan of action, and then how best to start experimentally learning. They’ll also begin learning how to arrange their own learning priorities, from most important to least important. For example, kids are fascinated with dinosaurs, so if some want to learn more about them, then a teacher or older student can help create more specific questions to ask: what did they eat; did they build nests for their young, how long did they live, and how did they defend themselves against their enemies? With such learning projects a better feeling for intelligent teamwork can also begin growing.
That's another little idea about what a liberal primary school would look like; in fact, it looks like a thriving and intelligent democracy! However, for such schools to begin growing, more adults need to re-arrange their priorities! They need ask themselves should their tax dollars be spent building such schools, or should they be spent on projects like sending more expensive robots to Mars to look for signs of ancient life? Priorities. How do we want our tax dollars spent, and how can we start telling our representatives about different priorities. Without those 2 actions liberal schools will remain largely an idea, rather than a reality. At present most of the public still doesn't even feel they have enough democratic power to say how their taxes should be spent, and so their money continues being controlled by wealthy folks who keep making millions from them, like in the military-industrial complex. In reality, the public continues being exploited by those who're obsessed on making more and more money. In a strong and vibrant democracy, however, taxpayers have not only a right, but the duty to say what their precious tax dollars should be spent for, and also to organize their democratic power at the polls! If not, then huge corporations will continue telling politicians how to spend the public's money.
What's the point? Well, the more students are mentally connected to that reality, the easier it becomes to improve it. In conservative book-oriented schools, however, students are kept from feel those kinds of connections, and thus they help perpetuate the social status quo. Why shouldn't students begin asking themselves if taxes would be better spent on helping limit carbon pollution and global warming, and putting more people to work improving our own nation? If aeronautical engineers want a challenge, then how about helping build more excellent roads, energy sources, and bicycles here on earth, so the poor can more easily satisfy their needs and wants without worrying about getting a flat tire and losing the bike altogether!
With such reasoning connecting students to their world, we Deweyan liberals certainly aren’t afraid to keep challenging the conservative educational status quo. To us such schools are merely hurting ourselves more than anyone else, by helping perpetuate a feudalistic economic society! Why, for example, shouldn’t even primary-age students begin thinking about how they can help others in the real world, others whose lives are much less meaningful and joyful than their own? And the more students are taught how to intelligently read a person's body language, like their tone of voice and their facial expressions, the easier it becomes to build a more friendly and helpful community. After all, can’t a good plumber help more people improve their lives than the 50 or so people helped to get in touch with their feelings by degree-laden psychiatrists!? Why shouldn't a good plumber teach people how to make minor repairs themselves, help them save some money, and in the process also build up their business? Don't people appreciate it when others share their knowledge with them?
Such kinds of intelligent learning can begin with vocation videos at the beginning of each year, even in 1st grade. They can help youngsters begin feeling what skills, knowledge, and, most importantly, what excellent character habit-arts are useful in the real world? That way they make an emotional connection with school as they start learning what vocation interests them most. In fact, these days it's becoming more painfully clear: of all technologically advanced countries, the US has one of the worst educational systems for training students to enter the business world after high school, which is where some 70% of our young folks want to go after they graduate, and the rest go after their college studies! As a result, many young folks are unprepared to start earning honest money, and thus remain more vulnerable to breaking the law for dishonest money. Why shouldn't students begin learning the difference between those 2 kinds of money? And what's more, because society is so interconnected, we all pay a great social price in higher taxes when students aren't allowed to start learning about police, construction, and professional kinds of work while in school! When students aren't taught what excellence means in the political, economic, and business world, then we all pay higher taxes for unemployment, welfare, police, and counts helping keep society safe from those with excessively destructive habits. Why shouldn't our schools be better at reaching out to those parents who use excessive punishment to make their children behave? Our overcrowded jails are often the result of such behavior. Aren't such thoughts really just social common sense? We liberal Deweyans say schools don't have to keep teaching a conservative book-centered agenda. They can start helping young folks learn to deal more intelligently with their own weak and unhealthful habit-arts, those of their parents, and also learn a practical skill!
In our still highly unstable feudalistic capitalist economy, where huge corporations dominate our economic and political systems, and where periodic recessions are becoming more and more common, more democratic skills are needed to help balance such power. If not, they'll continue making life more stressful while decreasing the public good. And, as jobs keep being deported and new ones created, learning new skills quickly becomes much more important than having a head full of academic trivia. At the University of Chicago Lab schools, for example, founded by Dewey in the late 1890s, they're teaching 2nd graders basic word-processing skills, and thus what good simply logical English sounds like. Computer skills have kept evolving since the PC was invented in the early 1970s.
So again, learning how best to learn a new skill becomes a very important habit-art, perhaps the most important one, and we'll see more about teaching such a skill in Section 37, Psychological Health! Who hasn't yet realized, the more difficult it is to learn a new skill, the more difficult life itself becomes? Thus liberal skills will help students break down what they want to learn into easily understandable and workable steps! That's a very important skill to learn, and what's more, it's useful throughout life. Even 1st graders can begin learning how best to learn what they want to learn. Students wanting to become police officers can then focus on all the skills they'll need on the job, like dealing intelligently with people, teamwork, what clothes to wear, and how to write a report. With their tremendous storehouse of knowledge, computers can be a great tool for taking students through their learning steps in just about any field of study.
To say the least, conservative book-centered schools largely ignore such a democratic and practical kind of education. The teacher merely makes an assignment, like, say, read a book and write a report on it. However, when students have little interest in reading such books, it makes school a place where teachers often regularly shame students for not completing their assignments, as if the student's learning wants and needs are completely irrelevant in the learning process! If that isn't the definition of educational slavery, then what is? The result is often more student stress and frustration! Is that the kind of schools we want or need our tax monies spent on? Are those the kind of teachers we want or need teaching in our schools? And so, is it any wonder our schools are now plagued by very high urban dropout rates, making life for our poor classes even more difficult than they need be? It's not only in those neighborhoods either; even in affluent neighborhoods most memorized abstract academic facts are soon forgotten if they're learned at all, helping make education in those schools too more of a social racket than our most helpful personal and social tool!
To us liberals it seems perfectly reasonable to ask: Why shouldn’t even primary school students be encouraged to work towards a profession by starting to experiment with a number of different job skills, especially when only about 30% of students go to college, and a far lower percentage of students actually get a 4-year degree! With a conservative book-centered educational model, some 70% of the next generation has already had their lives made more stressful and difficult! How many people in the real world want to know more about Shakespeare or algebra? For writers and scientists those are useful skills, but why neglect the educational needs of most other students! So, the more people who see the results of such dysfunctional schools, and want to help build better ones, the easier that challenge becomes.
Book facts are mainly important for researchers, writers, and scholars who write books. But why shouldn’t students who’re, say, studying how to be intelligent plumbers, police officers, or lawyers also learn something about intelligent clothes-making? Don't practical and good fitting clothes make work more enjoyable? And why shouldn’t the same apply to carpenters or accountants or even young medical students? Why shouldn't they all be able to get valuable training in our public schools so the transition to the real world is smoother, less frustrating, and much better for the economy? Isn’t that what medieval guilds did with students centuries ago, the same students who then helped build the monumental religious cathedrals tourists now snap pictures of every year? Such guilds weren't afraid of liberal student power, whereas our conservative schools today often ignore it. In truth, students today can get valuable on-the-job training in their own schools! Plumbing students can help keep their own schools’ plumbing systems as excellent as possible, as well as low income residents in their neighborhoods! And why shouldn’t they also begin learning about how a new tool could be invented, or a better paint formula be created with intelligent chemical experimentation? Why not allow students to use their high school chemistry classes for something else besides passing the next chemistry test? Wouldn't such useful and intelligent school work also help stretch tax dollars even further? After all, there are only so many computer and engineering jobs available, as graduates are now learning, so why not also give students the freedom to learn more about, say, healthful food growing, so their school cafeteria and neighborhood restaurants can serve better food, rather than the usual high caloric fare? And school maintenance workers will still be needed to supervise student work. Did you know McDonalds is now selling veggie burgers in India, even though they're often not paying decent wages in the US? Now, is that another intelligent challenge or what? So, again, liberal schools help anchor students to the real world about them.
Dewey too thought an intelligent work-based education would produce the best personal and social results for everyone, especially teachers and students. Teachers would help students begin feeling how enjoyable intelligent work can felt like, and thus begin contributing positively to their personal development, rather than saying our public schools should ignore such development. What 4th grader can't practice reading to adult day-care members, and what young singing students wouldn't love to practice their craft on such people as well? Don't even young doctors and lawyers need to learn the same kinds of character excellence as plumbers, fire fighters, and police officers? Why shouldn't teaching such excellent social habit-arts be just as important as teaching useful knowledge and skills? How is that not the most meaningful kinds of learning WHEN IT’S TAUGHT THOUGHTFULLY AND CREATIVELY!
In short, why shouldn’t schools be more a training for an inventive, creative, and helpful life, rather than for merely scoring well on the next yearly standardized test? To us Deweyan liberals that goal is merely artificial and disrespectful to the democratic ideals of equal rights and opportunities! Taxpayers have been charged over $4 Billion since 2002 to pay for such yearly tests, so you can begin seeing why laws like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards plan were passed; they give more public taxes to test writing and publishing companies. Once a test is built, then it's merely a question of printing copies of them. Like IQ tests in the early 1900s, such academic tests clearly discriminate against those minority students who simply haven't been conditioned to need to learn abstract facts; in many cases their parents have had their children trained for such schools years before they even start school!
So, why shouldn't more parents, students, and teachers not want to start experimentally building more liberal kinds of schools, where students can start learning important job skills before they graduate? In school shops students would have the freedom to practice the skills and knowledge they want to use in the real world. And what's more, in Behavioral psychology workshops they'll also start learning the intelligent democratic character habits all people need to build a strong and working democracy, like respect for all law-abiding people and our just laws, and how to think more about the public good, rather than the upper class good. As we've already seen, Behavioral role-playing is another very useful educational tool for learning any kind of knowledge and skill, just like school cooking shops are an excellent way to learn what diet excellence can taste like. Wouldn’t an electronics shop also be more than a little educational? Intelligently recycling the huge number of electronic gadgets is becoming more important every day. Wouldn’t it be a great way for students to start learning about physics too? How can so much information be stored on little objects like travel drives?
New Roles for Students
As we'll see in the sections about Reality Schools, equally important for students is experimentally learning about what excellent exercise and hygiene habit-arts feel like. Foreign students often don't have the same cleanliness habits others have. With healthcare costs continuing to skyrocket, such useful habits can be a benefit to both individuals and society. So, in an exercise shop, for example, why shouldn’t students start learning to exercise intelligently, that is, with a minimum of wasted energy? How often do people quickly become tired simply because they haven't learned to exercise intelligently? As Mark Twain once observed, habits are best built slowly, one step at a time.
Intelligently means more scientifically. For example, if students are taught properly, they would become more scientific about building any kind of new habit, even an exercise one. They would begin seeing how, say, math ideas like graphing and makes charts about results can make building any habit more scientific and intelligent, as well as being useful for improving any uncomfortable feelings from those exercises. If lifting a weight produces sore muscles, then replace it with a small weight! That way they begin getting in touch with their own body, and start learning how to intelligently make life more enjoyable and comfortable. Believe it or not, if they're taught properly, it’s possible to feel more energized and refreshed after exercise than before, rather than feeling drained and fatigued. Also, it's possible to feel more relaxed while exercising, providing one learns to use only the muscles one needs.
For example, why keep upper body muscles tense, like the upper trapezius muscle in the neck and shoulders while, say, jogging when the lower body muscles are really all that’s needed? I finally learned what that idea feels like, and it’s helped make all my workouts that much more enjoyable and refreshing. Imagine how much sooner young folks would learn such habits if they had the freedom to start intelligently experimenting with the intelligent exercise habits most everyone needs to live a healthy life. Gym teachers often learn the names of our muscles, so why not put such knowledge to use in an exercise workshop? In them students can also begin learning how just a few minutes of exercise a day can help make them stronger and healthier? In ancient Greece such knowledge became a regular part of the educational system, helping prepare young folks to defend their city-state in case of attack.
Again, where are our educational priorities, and how might they be improved? Is Civil War knowledge more important than dental hygiene; is useless mathematical knowledge more important than turning baby fat into useful coordinated muscles; is reading dull and boring 19th century novels more important than feeling good about one’s body and knowing how to keep it in good shape with an intelligent diet and exercise; and is learning soon-forgotten world history facts more important than learning how to enjoy learning itself? In psychological workshops, for example, why shouldn’t students learn to judge others by their destructive and constructive actions, rather than the color of their hair, skin, or how many tattoos they have? True or False: The less such intelligent habit-arts are ignored, the more people remain a slave to their own irrational impulses, instincts, and fearful feelings about different-looking people. Be honest now, isn’t being educated really knowing how to use freedom intelligently, rather than merely for passing the next test, or worse, how to release tension with destructive actions?
No doubt, for many different reasons conservatives of course may oppose building such student-centered schools. Perhaps they'll say they're too expensive, too wasteful, too chaotic, and won't really produce students able to compete with foreign students for tomorrow's jobs. Look at how the Russians beat us into space in the 1950s, some may say. However, as students of liberal education already know, and as we'll see more clearly in Section 26, The Eight Year Study, such schools have already been tested in the real world and in some ways produce even better results for students than conservative book-centered schools.
For example, in the first half of the 20th century, in Gary, Indiana, Winnetka, Illinois, and even Denver, Colorado such liberal school systems were built and run for years. Certainly, if the public knew more about that educational history, they would be much better prepared to start testing liberal ideas in their own neighborhood schools, not all at once but rather just one grade at a time. So, to condemn such liberal schools is merely a dogmatic response; there's really no objective evidence they won't work and never will! As we’ve seen already, in general conservatives since Plato just do not like democratic freedom and individual intelligent actions; they would much rather keep a dominating feudalistic social system in place, economically, politically, militarily, and educationally. For many of them, it's just fine a religiously dominated Middle Ages became a wealth-dominated modern world. So, they often criticize a liberal educational model, not because it doesn't work, but because it builds more democratic habits of equal rights and opportunities in the next generation! With such habits it becomes easier to keep challenging their wealth-based feudal social system! Any challenge to it must not be tolerated. Religious medieval conservatives felt the same way, only for religious reasons, not economic ones.
Why Liberal Schools?
Several reasons, really. As we've seen, ancient and medieval teachers often beat disobedient students with tree branches when they didn’t memorize their lessons. But aren't we today just as unintelligent, unkind, and cruel when WE send young folks out into life with both weak and useless business and character habits? Many may smile and say to themselves, too bad for them, but we all pay for such weak habits with higher taxes and a more dangerous social environment. So, who’s hurting whom? So, if conservatives say Dewey’s liberal educational model is impractical or too expensive before it's even tried, then they merely condemn a worthwhile idea before it's even tested and experimented with. If that isn't anti-scientific, then what is? In other words, such conservative criticism is defeatist and status quo at best, not to mention mean-spirited and possibly racist as well! Most inner city kids are non-white.
We Deweyan liberals say the public needs to know more about educational options for their neighborhood schools! And believe it or not, our popular media too sometimes makes such scientific learning more difficult. Within a conservative model the educational goal becomes passing the fabled Advanced Placement Test, so high school grads can get college credit. A few years ago many across the country celebrated a movie in which a drill instructor-like teacher lines up his math students in the evening and drills them to mechanically memorize more mathematical facts, day after day, until they can pass the Advanced Mathematics Test. No doubt, the motive was honorable; he wanted to enable his poor Latino students to become automotive engineers in college, rather than remain automotive grease monkeys in repair shops all their lives. The best way was to make them learn more math facts. After all, when much of the college educational model is still based on knowing more and more academic facts, whether they'll be used or not in the real world, then such drill-sergeant learning methods become useful; he was trying his best to work within the conservative system, and what's more, for many students it worked; they passed the test. The popular film was called Stand and Deliver.
However, what happens when parents don't encourage their children to learn more academic facts, like most parents don't? He discovered the drill-sergeant teaching method just didn't work; children weren't interested in passing such tests. In any case, the movie we liberals would like to see is the one about what those students DID to improve their communities and themselves with their mathematical knowledge! Such movies would not only show what character excellence looks like, but also help justify those mechanical and parrot-like methods of learning. In short, how much did their facts help them enjoy their lives and contribute to the public good? As far as we liberal Deweyans are concerned, that's the most important educational question of all. Knowledge is never only an end in itself; every action produces results, and they are the true test of educational excellence. Let’s hope that film would look like the very funny and educational movie High School High, the 1996 film about constructive community service work in school itself. In it students help expose a principal as a drug dealer! With the increasing occurrence of sexually abusive teachers, both public and religious, that kind of excellent work by students and teachers looks more important and needed than ever before.
Science Wars
No doubt, there are other conservative ideas and feelings helping prevent more practical scientific-oriented schools from evolving. We see today how conservatives continue working against scientific ideas like global warming, giving women more power to control their own bodies and choose when to have children or not, and even evolution science is often attacked. Conservatives in Texas, for example, just passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws on record, justified with the idea of protecting the unborn. At the same time, however, they continue enslaving the already born in conservative schools teaching the same subjects to all students, regardless of their educational needs and wants. And of course the battle over biological evolution is still echoing in many of our schools, even 150 years after Darwin first wrote its modern version, and a mountain of objective evidence since then helping established it as fact, not theory.
Even today many conservatives still want science to be seen as something cold and inhuman, and incapable of producing any kind of real kind and sympathetic actions, as if all ethical values aren’t learned experimentally! For many people today intelligent experimentation or character development shouldn't be taught in school; children should learn to follow orders rather than learn to think independently and intelligently for themselves.
One very popular TV series from the 1960s, for example, featured a science officer on a futuristic star-ship, the Enterprise. He was routinely portrayed as only half-human, entirely without emotion, and who even experiences extreme pain when he feels love. He’s coldly logical and mechanical -- science officer Spock! No doubt to us liberal Deweyans it’s mere propaganda, but how many young folks took that portrayal seriously, thinking science and logical thinking is somehow less than human, and felt science really can’t produce our strongest kinds of knowledge? If so, then their entire psyche was distorted and kept out of touch with the modern world, a world created at every turn by experimentally intelligent actions. As we’ve already seen, in an always changing world all learning can only be experimental!
In truth, then, no one gets away from experimental learning and practicing, no matter how much we try convincing ourselves our own personal ideas really reflect Eternal Truth! In fact, science and experimental learning are no more unfeeling and completely logical than any other habit-art; everyone’s body-mind always creates habits producing both feelings and ideas. In fact, merely believing life can be lived without emotions and feelings is itself an emotional idea; all universal assumptions are merely feelings based on varying amounts of evidence, from religious ideas of gods to quantum physics assumptions!
What’s more, the entire entertainment industry itself might still be back in the ‘stone-age’ at Shakespeare’s Old Globe Theatre if it weren’t for people like Tom Edison feeling he might be able to use some scientific facts to build a motion picture camera! In short, NO ONE -- not even confident-sounding star-ship commanders -- rise above using experimental testing arts of learning! We all use them every day, either consciously or subconsciously, creatively or routinely, even everyone in Hollywood! Who really knows what kind of profits a movie will generate before it opens? Some scientifically built movies have been huge flops! How can it be otherwise in a constantly moving and evolving world, where no one really knows exactly what’s going on out there? Yet those basic philosophic facts of life are discouraged when experimental habits are portrayed as mere half-human logic. Even reincarnation arts, so popular to many in Hollywood, not only evolved experimentally, but also were learned and practiced by children experimentally, with rewards and encouragements used to make such ideas feel right.
Thus, from Dewey’s liberal educational point of view, this idea bears repeating. Our conservative schools suffer from the same narrowness about learning to intelligently practice experimental learning as many religious organizations do also. They both want to keep people undereducated about what’s going on in the real world, and remain socially obedient to their leaders. They have little interest in empowering the next generation to democratically guide their own growth and learning in socially excellent ways. However, within any strong and healthy democracy such intelligent experimental habits are its engines and fuel. Furthermore, without such habits we'll continue seeing conservatives continue working to keep their social power by, say, passing laws making voting more difficult, women’s freedom more restricted, and also education ruled by largely conservative boards of education aimed at reducing teachers' union power more than anything else. In effect, such people continue maintaining a feudalistic world supposedly ending 4 centuries ago! They certainly don’t want people who can think intelligently for themselves, support candidates who’ll continue working to promote democratic habits, and look at the results of actions to see how they restrict those habits and merely protect the status-quo. In such a conservative educational model books and their ideas must be treated with great respect, rather than used merely as tools for answering conservative challenges. Until quite recently, how many people thought Columbus was an honorable and just man?
Bottom line: People already have the power to start improving their own neighborhood schools; it’s just a question of becoming more organized and focused! Indeed, the very future of our democracy, or any democracy, rests upon such schools, homes, and churches. Without them, maintaining a feudalistic status quo will be easy. Parents, teachers, and students can begin experimenting with a more liberal model of educational excellence, based on anchoring students to the real world, rather than keeping them ignorant about its actions.
For example, recently a University of California, Santa Barbara study tried calculating how much drop-out students cost California residents in extra taxes and lost revenue. They said it costs taxpayers about $1.1 Billion every year in lost revenue! How can unemployed young folks pay taxes? So, unless you're one of Wall Street's multi-millionaire Masters of the Universe, that's a lot of money to ignore. Just imagine how much better life could be for everyone if that money were used on other things besides paying probation officers, judges, and buying more handcuffs, pepper spray, and terrible jail food!
Also, because young dropouts are about twice as likely to commit crimes, those annual costs add up to about 8.9 Billion dollars a year! And that’s just for one state! If you think it's not such a big loss, perhaps you'd like to think again. The more goods are stolen, the higher business and medical insurance rates go, which in turn are paid for by shoppers and taxpayers with higher prices. So, again, we Deweyan liberals say until something else is done educationally to build more student-centered schools and start anchoring students to events in the real world, our own narrow and shallow conservative book-centered public schools will continue helping produce such results! In fact, many people are starting to ask themselves, is such a conservative book-oriented system merely another form of Jim Crow racism? After all, many white and Asian parents start reading to their children from an early age, and so they're already more comfortable in schools where books and abstract ideas are the center of activity.
More About Teacher, Student, and Parent Roles
A little earlier I mentioned some differences between conservative and liberal educational roles. Here I’ll just add a few more ideas to what I said earlier.
In conservatives schools those teachers who learn to adjust to a system of teaching academic book-facts often become what may be called efficient secretaries. One of my student teaching supervisors was like that. He knew what he was going to teach from one year to the next, and so to save time he would keep using the same tests years after year. In other words, he saw his role as basically preparing students for the next math test, and little else. What’s more he got very good at picking out those students who might become discipline problems, and so he would go around the room and make sure they knew he was watching them and wasn’t going to tolerate any misbehaving. He was much like a military platoon leader, always serious and business-like. No doubt, given the nature of an educational system making students learn what most of them have little interest in learning, those kinds of habits are useful; he and many parents and teachers too felt learning more academic facts was what education should be. It was almost an all-white neighborhood and so many students were already conditioned to such habits by junior high. Many may not have liked it but what could they do; they or their parents simply didn’t know about any other options.
However, are those kinds of teachers needed in all our public schools? And if not, then shouldn’t parents know about some different learning options for their neighborhood schools? Shouldn’t more parents know schools can be so much more than merely places they can drop their kids off and have a few hours to them? How many parents and students today don’t even know how important it is to learn what intelligent experimental learning is, much less how to learn it and practice it both in and out of school; how many know how important it is for their health and well-being? How many parents and students have a realistic picture of their own unhealthful, weak, and excessive habits, or about intelligent ways of improving them one step at a time? How many students and parents still feel their diet and exercise habits are fine, or that it’s who they are and will always be that way? And how many parents and students ask themselves is this the best food we could be eating, and if not, what is? Such feelings are common when children aren’t taught different ideas of excellence as well as how to slowly build better ones with intelligent experimental actions.
If, as Dewey says, bettering a situation is the only good, then liberal teachers, parents, and students all become challenged to help each other learn to see what’s happening here and now, both personally and socially, and then also work to make such actions more democratic and intelligent. That improvement habit-art is one of the major differences in roles between conservative and liberal schools and people. Conservatives tend merely to accept the social status quo; such habits simply feel more comfortable. And when democratic habits of equality keep growing, as they have been for the past 50 years, many feel very uncomfortable; thus we see reactions against civil rights and gay rights workers. It’s merely another result of not teaching democratic habits of equality in our schools. However, those liberal kinds of democratic values continue growing in many homes, churches, and schools. Public classroom help would see them continue growing.
So, the role of liberal teachers, parents, and students is to encourage others to use an intelligent experimental improving art whenever they want, and as often as they want, both in and outside of school! It marks a big difference between liberal and conservative ideas. For example, did you even hear even one of your teachers tell you to add decimal numbers as much as possible outside of school, or talk about the Civil War or Shakespeare outside of school? Students would no doubt turn to each other in bewilderment, or even think the teacher has finally gone off the deep end! Many students know what they’re learning in book-oriented schools is practically useless in the real world, and yet they’ve never known any other learning model, nor have their parents. As a result, not only are they kept isolated from the real world, but worst, they have no mental weapons to challenge a conservative book-model of education, so that status quo remains in place; fully half of those illegible to vote don’t, and often complain about the system being rotten and corrupt! Well, what did they expect that those with wealth wouldn’t keep using it to make themselves even wealthier?
Our liberal goal, then, is to both practice and teach how an intelligent experimental habit-art can be used to improve any situation. In fact, that educational goal is a big part of our new liberal educational gospel, and it can be practiced by paupers and presidents. In the 1930s FDR, for example, practiced passing legislation to improve economic actions, and thus make life a little safer for everyone. And in the 1990s conservatives began experimenting to end those improvements; the result has been increased wealth for the wealthiest and less wealthy for most everyone else.
So, we ask, isn't it time more people face this fact of life? -- being educated is not only knowing how to sense and imagine how a situation might be improved, but also enjoying that learning process, especially when it’s used to help make life more equal and democratic, especially for the disadvantaged and undereducated!? As a poet might say, when you’ve seen the light, then teach the light. What makes history so entertaining and educational is seeing all the difference versions of ‘light’ people have seen down through the ages, and told themselves their vision is the Ultimate Truth! However, we liberal Deweyans like to keep asking: what better truth can there be in an always changing world than knowing how to intelligently keep improving what we already have here and now, and make more opportunities more available to as many as possible? Is there a better definition of the public good? Without such actions slavery would still be socially acceptable around the world. However, there are more forms of slavery than one; educational and economic slavery are still very much alive today.
Conservatives mean to cherish and keep as many habits as they can for as long as they can. Religious habits are a perfect example of that idea. But again, as Dewey said, such feelings stem from merely one philosophic assumption: there actually exists absolutely unchanging objects making their knowledge the Truth, and so it’s our duty is to make people accept it! The New Testament, for example, expresses that idea clearly: make the children accept our version of the Truth. Thus, without democratic equal rights allowing people to see whatever light they like to see, providing it’s safe and legal, a philosophic and religious quest for certainty and social dominance has been active in Western civilization for thousands of years. Those are some liberal rays of light, and with them it's easy to see why even university higher education has been a great liberator of people; it celebrates those many diverse kinds of light, while most of the great influential people in Western civilization never saw such light.
Thus, another major difference between liberal and conservative educators is the way they want to treat students. Liberals like to treat people as individuals, each with their own learning needs and wants, and thus help them become more independent and intelligently caring people. Conservatives, in general, often feel students need to be dominated and taught absolute kinds of Truth, meaning of course their own habits. Today, more and more people are seeing such liberal kinds of light, and thus seeing different kinds of democratic social improvement.
Thus, liberal teachers, parents, and students act more like friendly guides helping teach experimental kinds of intelligence, rather than givers of assignments many students aren't really interested in. There's must more respect between liberal teachers and students, and that respect makes learning much more meaningful, useful, and enjoyable. The more students are committed emotionally to learning something like, say, how their bodies work, the easier it becomes for them to start actually learning more about themselves, and also respecting others as well. After all, in many ways most everyone works the same way, and when they don't then we have the tools of medical science to help.
So, in liberal schools teachers will no longer be required to assign all students a never-ending stream of reading and writing assignments, and then spend their time grading such assignments and tests. It’s a perversion of learning itself, which is all active and experimental. Besides, character tests are much more important in the real world than anything else; just ask all those politicians who’ve been caught cheating on their wives! Students in liberal schools will learn to read and write as they begin learning what they want to learn; they’ll learn reading makes learning easier. Thus, liberal schools are places where students are free to practice those active kinds of learning. How can we call ourselves a democracy when we still demand teachers and students submit to only one teaching method and one set of subjects, like the No Child Left Behind law now requires? Isn’t defending such a feudalistic law merely another form of hypocrisy? Conservatives are supposed to be the great defenders of individual freedom and liberty. But when are we going to start practicing in our schools those basic political ideals, that all people, even children, have the right to pursuit happiness in their own way, as long as it's safe and legal? Again, it seems the conservative book-centered learning model is both disrespectful to our founding ideals and artificial for both students and teachers. Why should students not be taught how to keep intelligently improving both themselves and their country?
Our new liberal teacher role thus offers a variety of constructive experimental projects to learn more useful habits for life BEYOND school or prison, so dangerous habits and more prison-time become less likely. No doubt, some students and prisoners have great amounts of emotional baggage, so to speak; they feel hostile to many things ordinary people generally ignore. Their learning needs, then, are different from other students, so why ignore them? They too need to be shown how to intelligently express their hostility and anger when they’re children; anger management groups in schools will help such students, and hopefully start better educating the parents from which they got such hostility. When students aren’t learning more about what they want to learn about, then it’s the teacher’s role to suggest more activities they can experiment with.
Thankfully, most children are naturally curious about both themselves and their world, and so many interesting learning projects can be experimented with, like what their own body looks like under the skin, how to take care of their important organs and muscles, and also what's going on in their own neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods, for example, as so dangerous it’s not safe to walk through them. So, why shouldn’t students begin learning how to intelligently start improving such situations? The more that habit-art is ignored, the more dangerous life remains.
No doubt, in some liberal schools some students may merely learn how to become a tattoo artist, or a painter or carpenter, but what's wrong with that if they practice their art intelligently, respectfully, and creatively; who’s to say it's not worthy work? And, also, the sooner prisoners get the freedom to learn what they want to learn while managing their anger, then the sooner they'll become less of a burden to themselves and taxpayers. If not, if students and prisoners aren't given such freedom, then the social result will more likely be the extremely high dropout, unemployment, and returning-to-prison rates we see today. In sections 36-40 much more is said about such learning experiments.
Because student and teacher roles would be greatly changed, it’s why they should be built only one grade at a time. If not, older students and teachers with conservative book habits will feel greatly disoriented and confused. With that method of improvement schools won't become more chaotic. Young students will be taught how to experiment intelligently, with intelligent planning and testing of their ideas. Isn’t that the way intelligence works in the real world? Aren’t movies all built from a script telling what actions will be filmed?
Some students wanting to become doctors and nurses will naturally want to learn about their own bodies, how they work, and how they're going to change as they get older. Some will feel like starting a little student business or learning a useful skill to help others, like psychologists and tradespeople do outside of school. And best of all, in such schools children will begin learning how to learn intelligently! Do they learn best while listening to music, eating, dancing, merely memorizing some ideas, or by intelligently testing themselves to see how their ideas actually work to keep improving their own lives and their own worlds?
Students will also have more leisure to experiment with different skills and ideas. After all, don't adults have leisure time each day, when they can relax, let their feelings mature, and perhaps imagine some new experiments they’d like to try? The challenge for such teachers and parents is thus to encourage constructive and respectful imaginative thinking with questions. In such ways actively helping students becomes a very important part of liberal education. Such results would become much easier if students were no longer required to merely sit at their desks day after day and quietly work boring assignments merely for good test scores and grades. They would, instead, start learning another important fact of life: they will make themselves more intelligent and caring people only as they actively practice those skills! One such on-going project might be helping the neighborhood homeless to learn some more useful skills and knowledge besides panhandling and begging.
No doubt best of all, students in liberal schools would not feel what it's like to be an educational slave! They would be liberated to learn what feels most interesting to them. Is there any sweeter feeling than being free to guide their own growth and control their own life? And the more that habit-art grows, the more confidence students will have to keep improving themselves and their nation. With that kind of confidence students can begin scaling any intellectual mountain.
Grades too will become much less important. I once caught a student actually changing his grade in a grade book; and he — a 7th grader — then offered me money not to say anything about it! And to show you what conservative schools are like, he was expelled the following day, rather than being sent to a Behavioral workshop to talk with older psychology students and counselors about better ways of telling his parents they’re putting too much damn pressure on him to get good grades, and how he has a right to live his own life, rather than the life his parents are pressuring him to live.
The conservative No Child Left Behind bill, signed into law in 2002, requires teachers to cover so much academic material so students will memorize a required amount of facts and score well on standardized tests. However, since then we’ve also seen a number of scandals exposed where teachers have been caught changing student test scores so they won't lose their jobs; one even happened in Washington, D.C. itself. Those kinds of conservative teaching requirements become much less important in liberal schools. If students want to go to college, then they can spend their junior and senior years learning more facts and academic knowledge; mentally they’re better prepared to memorize such facts. But in the lower grades liberal schools won’t make teachers give students assignments they don't want to have. Instead, their role will be helping students learn to intelligently use the knowledge they get. When children try their best at whatever they choose to learn, that is what’s important! As they grow they'll also learn how their learning experiments could be even more intelligent!
No doubt, many educators may object. How can we ever hold teachers and students responsible for learning if we don’t have grades, tests, and lesson plans? Well, what’s wrong with students writing their own lesson plans? Why shouldn’t they learn how to name the skill they should learn before they start studying something, like how to jump rope 50 times without missing a jump? Or read a page in 30 seconds or less? Or, write the alphabet in less than a minute? And during such testing experiments why shouldn’t students also be asked to learn such skills in a relaxed way, without putting useless tension and stress on themselves? Such learning experiments can become a part of their public school file, so they begin learning how important their present actions are for their future?
Should even young students be trusted with such educational freedom? Be honest now, have you ever seen a 7 or 8 year old who isn’t interested in learning something? Many start collecting things. Charles Darwin began his lifelong love of nature by collecting beetles when he was a child. And one can only imagine how much better his life would have been if Albert Einstein too was allowed and helped to study his 2 favorite subjects, math and science. Even in 2nd grade one conservative teacher told him he wasn’t a good student and would never amount to anything. Thank goodness he didn’t listen to him very much. Eventually, while still in his 20s, Einstein stunned the scientific world with a new and improved model of nature! He made himself aware of some recent experimental results, and then built a new model of nature to fit such results.
But even if they are built slowly, won’t such schools be too chaotic and disorganized for real learning to take place? Welcome to life in a democracy. Isn’t life in the real world rather chaotic and disorganized? Yet things get done and people keep learning mostly because they respect others and our laws set up to make life more organized and regulated. The challenge for parents, teachers, and students, then is to make our schools better reflect that organized and regulated reality, and create new regulations so those with wealth and power don’t abuse the public good. The more that happens, the more people become their own masters, and more democratic our nation becomes.
The Educational Present
Today, in many places around the world, such liberal public schools are largely only a mere possibility, just as science was a few centuries ago. Today, in fact, conservative book-centered schools seem to be the only kind of schools around, thanks largely to our conservative upper class and the politicians who largely do their bidding. The public is still largely unaware of what liberal schools would look like. Why? Well, in part because many of our daily educational tools, like newspapers and TV, are made to focus on reporting which nation can teach more academic facts to their young folks than anyone else, and how our standardized test scores compare with other nations. To them it’s as if educational freedom, creativity, and helpful experimental actions are worth nothing. Thus, many people still believe in forcing children to learn more academic trivia and it’s the best kind of education they can get.
However, we Deweyan liberals still like to ask: Is it? Is the conservative book-based model the best? If it were, then why are so many young folks simply rejecting it and dropping out of school before they graduate, as much as 50% in some areas?! To us there are certainly better ways to educate the next generation to live in a democratic republic, where voting for progressive candidates is one of the best habit-arts to learn. If so, then isn't it time we began experimenting with a more liberal democratic learning model, where students learn what feels most interesting to them, and how to intelligent keep making little improvements in their lives and their countries? How can we build any sense of community, democratic fairness, and character excellence like honesty and respectfulness when they're simply not formally taught in our public schools? Aren’t those kinds of habit-arts the best antidote for any kind of feudalistic system based on ideas of absolute Truth? In such a system young folks are conditioned to mostly obey their supervisors, thus making it easier for soldiers and corporate workers to humbly and unquestioningly obey their leaders. Thus anyone who blows the proverbial whistle on those who go beyond the law and human decency are quickly labeled traitor and hunted down wherever they may go? So-called whistleblowers who merely tell people what their government is actually doing are seen as treasonous traitors, and thus make the status quo that much more secure!
Such feudalistic habits begin growing in our own conservative public schools, homes, and churches, where students are made to obey or else drop out and fail. Thus corporate greed, government secrecy, war, and in general a feudalistic world stays alive and well from generation to generation. Lately, however, it seems more and more people are waking up and asking themselves if that's the kind of world we want our taxes supporting, and if not, then how can we start building more liberal schools to end all such undemocratic and medieval institutions and organizations? Conservative types who love to feel the power to keep control over people already know full well, today’s children are tomorrow’s workers, and so if they allow more democratic schools to keep growing, it’ll become more difficult to keep their power. For many of them life is often reduced to such simplified logic and thinking. Thus, more liberal democratic-oriented schools become highly undesirable. The good news today is such philosophic and educational choices and options have almost never been so clearly defined and drawn as they are today. Upon them, a strong and vibrant democratic world rests.
Many more people today are taking the first step to real educational improvement; they’re realizing conservative schools are producing weak and unhealthful personal and social results! They’re simply not educating as many young folks as they could about what really matters in life, namely intelligent respect and helpfulness. With their help we continue seeing dangerous and armed neighborhood teenage gangs throughout the country, made up of young folks who could make no emotional connection with their book-centered schools, except to get out of them as fast as possible. Kind and law-abiding parents continue seeing their children being killed needlessly, poverty increasing, and also illegal drug selling, as well as extortion 'protection' rackets. As a result, more and more parents, teachers, and students are realizing how important their own neighborhood schools for improving all such socially weak and unhealthful actions! What seems to be missing the most is merely what more liberal schools might look like, and also how they might be best built. They’re seeing how conservative laws and educational plans must be changing in order to start liberating the last segment of society now still largely enslaved -- our children. Without giving them some intelligent skills to better challenge their teachers and even parents some times, we in effect condemn progress and perpetuate a still medieval social status quo.
John Dewey’s educational and philosophic ideas in the early 1900s made it possible for people to, in effect, start thinking outside the proverbial conservative educational box! The Common Core State Standards plan today is in fact yet another medieval-type of educational model, catering mainly to those parents who use their wealth to condition their children in expensive pre-schools to reading more books and learning more academic trivia. What matters most in a vibrant democracy, however, is teaching children how to use facts intelligently and creatively to keep improving life right around them. The future is ours for the making, but to make change more lasting and permanent, we must start here and now, in our own neighborhood schools.
9. LIBERAL EDUCATION’S NEW LEARNING ART
Intelligently Connecting Students to Their World
With Section 8 all the most progressive educational ideas of John Dewey have been introduced. Thus, the rest of the book will be a fleshing out and expanding of those general ideas, describing them in more detail so their meanings become clearer. And so in this section we look more deeply into the art of experimental learning lying at the heart of Dewey’s liberal model.
Obviously, the key work in this section’s title is intelligently! It makes all the difference in the world. Upon the idea of intelligent experimental learning Dewey not only built his entire philosophic model, but his educational model as well. Because it’s the best learning method in an always changing nature, indeed, the only learning method, learning itself is confined to our natural world. Thus, all ethical, political, artistic, and educational ideas become experimental, while their worth and value as based on the actual results they produce in a certain situation, and also on a person’s motives for acting. Such results and motives determine how intelligent a person’s experimental actions are. What's the sense in allowing students the freedom to sensually start feeling more and more of their world if they’re not actually taught how to intelligently use their knowledge to keep improving life, either their own, their communities, or their nation's? And, what's more, it’s with such results and motives that most of the US’s wars can be judged less than intelligent. Conservatives may say our American empire or spreading democracy justifies all such wars, but it would be interesting to see how many of those who died building that empire and foreign democracies thought their sacrifice was worth it.
As we've seen, student freedom too is an important part of Dewey’s educational model, but it is not an absolute freedom. Freedom means merely being able to make and test a plan, as well as change it too, but in any case, plans and tests should be intelligent, rather than destructive and routine.
No doubt, some radical libertarians and anarchists may feel school should be a place where students can do anything they want, even not learn anything if they choose. Some schools are like that, like England’s Summerhill School. There the democratic freedom to learn is the most important habit-art to teach, helping build student independence rather than conformity. But Dewey might ask, what’s the use of having freedom if you don’t know how to use it intelligently and constructively, so both personal and social improvement remains an intelligent option? In his kind of active experimental learning model students learn how to act intelligently in whatever they want to learn, rather than routinely or trial-and-error. Besides, even at Summerhill school students do not have complete freedom. They are expected to what character excellence means, like honesty and respect for others’ property; stealing, for example, is still something unacceptable, as also would be forcing others to do what they don’t want to do.
In a liberal Deweyan school students and parents have the freedom to learn what experimental excellence feels like, no matter what they study. For example, some students may want to learn more about basketball, but in that process they'll begin learning what intelligent basketball players learn. They’ll learn about good diet, exercise, practice, and rest habits, as well as how to use their art to make their world a little better place and also how to creatively play against different kinds of teams! The late great college basketball coach John Wooden taught his players to think creatively for themselves and decide how they should act in certain situations – to think on their feet, so to speak. That kind of intelligent habit is useful in every walk of life, not just on the basketball court. They might even want to learn about the history of athletics, how they evolved, how they might be improved, how to invent new games, how to entertain fans, and what best to use their money for. To us Deweyan liberals those are the habits of an intelligent athlete, rather than being merely given a ball and allowed to run back and forth. In that kind of educational model students would also learn how useful reading, writing, and speaking can be. They’re all useful skills for learning and telling others about themselves. Indeed, the doors of intelligent excellence can open with any subject and art whatsoever, if, however, teachers are themselves trained to teach that all-important habit-art of intelligence! The educational challenge, then, is to teach such skills intelligently and constructively. True, many students won’t become professional basketball players, but at least they’ll know what intelligence means in action, and thus be better able to apply that important learning art to any subject whatsoever!
Some may ask if students should be required to be in school at all. Well, as a matter of fact, they aren’t even today. Parents are free to home school their children if they’re qualified. But the more school become a place where they can begin learning more about what interests them, and are taught in a warm and accepting atmosphere how to intelligently practice their skills, then the question of school attendance will become much less important.
In short, the more their own wants and desires are not only respected but also anchored to what intelligent excellence feels like, then the more they’ll want to be in school, rather than dropping out. Why neglect the athletically gifted and encourage only the intellectually gifted? Just look as how many smart people are now running our government, or rather not running it, and then realize there’s more to excellence than merely a good memory and debating skills. There’s also having a democratic sense of the public good, and working for equal rights and opportunities! So, what have we got to lose by teaching students how to intelligently learn more about they want to learn more about? How can we say we’re a democracy and yet keep out children enslaved to learning what they don’t need or want to learn? Shouldn't the ultimate educational goal be to intelligently connect students to their desires and their world, and show them how they too can build helpful creative habits and feelings? How many senior citizens would greatly enjoy watching student basketball games, or even ping pong matches, as well as being helped to better exercise with student athletes? Hey, who's ready for another snappy game of chess?
To us Deweyan liberals many parents are still too educationally narrow-minded; their own conservative school experience has narrowed confined their ideas about what excellent education can be. They see slick new laptops, high rise office and apartment buildings, shiny new cars, TVs, cell phones, and a host of new electronic toys, and also feel all our schools are equally modern. Many feel we really have left the Middle Ages completely behind us. As we’ve been seeing, however, in so many ways it’s simply not true, education included! In fact, our own passive, conservative, book-oriented schools are yet one more example of that idea, as are our huge corporations, universities, spirit-based religions, and many of our political systems. Many are still run like feudal estates, from the top down rather than as a democratic system. When's the last time you saw college students having an equal number of votes on their board of trustees, so they could say how much tuition they should pay, or how much college presidents should get paid? Where is it written largely unelected boards of trustees should always have absolute power over all students and teachers? In liberal schools, however, students would have an equal voice in all such matters, so when they enter the adult world they'll have a much stronger democratic feeling for how their businesses should be run.
Without public primary schools intelligently teaching students about such democratic feelings, we’ll simply continue seeing students and parents exploited as much as possible in the real world. Why should any corporate CEO get paid as much as 500 times what their workers are making? Don't such undemocratic practices merely create a feudalistic aristocracy with more wealth-power than anything else? No doubt, we’ll continue seeing more student protests and rebellions, but for us the ultimate goal is decision equality, on college boards of trustees as well as corporate boards of directors. So, teaching students how to experimentally learn what they want, as long as it’s safe and legal, and also learning what's actually happening in our world, gives us the best way to answer an on-going challenge: how can we best keep making life more democratically equal rather than feudally unequal? The more student intelligence is unleashed, the more democratic and tolerate life will become for all.
Intelligent Experimentation is Sense-Based, Not Word Based
For almost the entire history of life on earth, mere sense-based trial-and-error learning was the only learning model; senses created feelings and they in turn guided actions. Fearful feelings about dangerous animals, for example, often produced defensive actions. For almost all of the last 4 billion years, animals used that kind of sense-based learning, including our own primate ancestors. Only when our early ancestors like H. habilis began consciously working to make useful stone tools did a creative and imaginative factor in learning begin growing on a deeper level. Some imagined not only what such tools would look like, but also how such tools could be made experimentally. Even then, however, such active work was always guided by all their senses. And as larger brains, memories, and speaking habits evolved more recently, human creativity grew even stronger, even though they didn’t always produce intelligent results, as warfare's history teaches us. True, the sense-based trial-and-error art of learning is never completely eliminated, as any patient knows who's tried different medicines to cure a disease, but always with the help of our senses more useful results have been discovered, to the point of practical certainty with some ideas. So, the natural question becomes: why keep students anchored to merely reading more and more academic facts, rather than learning to intelligently use sense-based experimentation?
Simple sense-based trial-and-error learning has remained the basic animal learning habit-art throughout time; even plants feelingly react to energies around them. And within the last 4 centuries more and more people have refined sense-based experimentation enough to make it a science itself, or the art of testing ideas, as Dewey says.
With the help of people like Leonardo and Francis Bacon, within the last 4 centuries mankind has won a sense-based control over natural forces unlike any other species in earth history, and so the educational challenge today is to not merely keep reading about such facts, but to actively teach students that creative and liberating habit-art itself! The challenge for all liberal parents, teachers, and students, then, is to keep deepening and socializing the sense-based knowledge students come to school with, rather than ignoring it with more and more academic book-facts.
Rural kids, for example, can keep learning about creative ways of improving crops and livestock, and urban kids can focus on thinking creatively about their own neighborhoods as well. They can be taken out into their own neighborhoods and begin sensing what's going on in them; they can even build classroom models of them too, so it becomes easier to talk creatively about them and learn about possible improvements. Only in those kinds of sense-based liberal schools will the medieval door to concentrated and dangerous social power finally be opened and made more democratic. So, to ignore active sense-based experimental learning practices in our public schools model is merely to weaken the next generation from intelligently making our nation more democratic, rather than feudalistic. Never once in my public school career did I hear experimental learning was our most powerful learning art. I was always busy being given more academic trivia to learn and taking more tests to prove I really wasn't sleeping in class.
That conservative learning model, in turn, kept me isolated from what was happening in my own city, Chicago. For example, in the 1960s Mayor Richard J. Daley had the power to make the city run rather smoothly; he regularly gave teachers raises and so there was almost never a strike. However, life remained more difficult for the African community. Daley told African leaders their people needed to, as it were, pull themselves up by their boot straps. They had to go out and get better jobs on the police and fire forces. But at the same time he made it difficult for them to be hired.
What's more, students were kept out of the demonstration loop, so to speak. It was as if students had absolutely no right or freedom to even talk about such things, much less actively demonstrate to improve the situation. Teachers had so much material to cover for the next standardized test, and so most all students remained disconnected from making their own city more equal and democratic. How exactly were Africans in South Side slums to get decent-paying jobs when they were restricted from getting them, not to mention African women as well? Construction contracts too went through city hall, and so they often went to people who hired the ‘right’ people. As a result, racial hatreds continued festering in the city and young Africans found it difficult to even find a good-paying job, even if they had learned all the academic trivia they were given. And would you like to imagine what life was like for Africans in the southern states at the time?
Improving all such unequal and feudalistic social situations can improve in more liberal democratic kinds of schools. In them children not only are educated about what's happening in their own cities, but are also given the freedom to actively work to improve such situations. Why are about 25% of our young folks unemployed, and what can we do to improve it? Why should any liberal tolerate economic or labor bosses running their organizations like medieval barons governed their little fiefdoms!? Like the medieval Church, our modern corporations and governments too still have a great desire to continue teaching habits of obedience to as many as possible; how else is the war-like feudalistic status quo kept in place, even though real threats are few indeed? How many still feel our country is always right, no matter what it does? If that were the situation could there be any progress at all?
Some Philosophic History
Basing education on active sense-based experimental projects in fact make an important break with the long-standing conservative educational model based mostly on reasoning with abstract facts and ideas. Dewey's liberal model thus activates the entire sense-based feeling half of the human body-mind. As we’ve seen, even before Plato lived in the 300s BCE, conservatives began waging a war on sense-based knowledge; one such philosopher was called Parmenides.
In order to convince people they really knew the absolute unchanging True about life and nature, conservatives like Parmenides and Plato had to celebrate reasoning as the best learning method, not sense-based experimentation. For people like them sense-based knowledge could only produce changing and evolving kinds of truth, whereas reasoning and logic could produce absolutely certain Truth. For example, all plane triangles are enclosed 3-sided figures, therefore it’s absolutely certain the interior angles add up to 180 degrees! Thus mere reasoning satisfied their quest for absolute certainty. Conservative Plato spent much of his energy arguing the senses could not produce absolute certainty, and so he ignored experimental testing as a useful learning tool. For him all True knowledge was based on unchanging objects like spirit-objects, existing in a completely different realm of nature. And for thousands of years conservatives after him continued radically separating mankind from our very sense-based natures themselves! Psychically, mankind was radically separated from the very sense-based world everyone lived in!
What’s more, during the Middle Ages that conservative model of life and learning became an almost complete monopoly in Europe, as children were told to disregard what their senses were telling them, and instead focus on thinking about spirit-objects and how to earn a heavenly life after death. What's more, if they didn’t obey they might be burned to death and go to hell for all eternity! As a result, religious ideas became the most important ideas to know, like salvation, sin, god, and the soul. The senses could tell us nothing about such ideas, and so they were to be ignored; everything is part of god's plan and salvation is possible. Meanwhile, deadly diseases, rampant poverty, and unimaginative ignorance marked life for centuries in such a feudalistic educational world.
Has that world ended? Far from it. No doubt, religious ideas of Truth have become much less important, but today even our conservative book-oriented schools still celebrate reasoning and logic as the primary method of learning, only now with the hope for a well-paying job after some 20 years of reading more books and learning more facts. And with the recent growing feudalistic control of our economy by a few score huge corporations, even that idea of being seen as merely that – an idea!
Since the late Middle Ages, however, and the growth of a sense-based experimental learning habit, people have begun feeling how its knowledge is simply a more powerful form of learning. It produces more reliable kinds of knowledge to help make life less dangerous and more enjoyable. Sadly, however, many of our conservative schools have yet to make the change over to experimental learning for all public school students! No doubt, some academic facts are useful to know, as well as how to reason logically with them, but to build schools teaching mainly that kind of sense-based learning habit makes school a rather frustrating bore for most all students; some 70% don't go on to college, while also helping produce high drop outs rates, unemployment, and crime.
It certainly doesn’t have to be that way! Our wisest educators, including John Dewey, told us schools can't be better than when they help students stay sensually connected to their environment, and have the freedom to intelligently work and answer both personal and social challenges. A vacant neighborhood lot can be seen as a challenge to build another community garden, or as a space for building a neighborhood chicken coop. And best of all, with such active and sense-based community work, not only is student character excellence strengthened, but democratic people power as well.
Character excellence. In ancient Greece when young men reached 18 they took a solemn vow to, among other things, obey the laws. So, a natural question becomes: why isn't that useful character-builder included in a student's high school graduation ceremony today? Don’t we expect all students to respect our just laws? And shouldn’t they start learning how they can pay for actually breaking a fair and just law? Aren't those kinds of 'honor code' habit-arts just as important as passing a high school academic exit test? Indeed, isn't that what democratic and character excellence is all about?
Coming to our Senses
Such an active, experimental, sense-based humanistic education is what we Deweyan liberals are suggesting, and where intelligent character habits become just as important as useful knowledge and skills. For example, the more students sense and feel what unequal rights and opportunities are like, the less chance there'll be for them to practice such actions when they're adults, and the stronger our democracy will become. Since long before Plato's day, conservatives have fought against such democratic feelings of equality.
Sadly, even today, sense-based reports from around the nation and world are telling us equal rights are still less than reality for millions of people. Almost certainly, where that reality exists will also exist conservative schools demanding obedience to teachers. As a result, around the world women are still greatly discriminated against and even physically abused, as are many other minorities; in some places even innocent children are forced to become murderous soldiers. The point is, our schools are the most important institutions for teaching the next generation what democratic equality feels like. And, if they’re distracted from sensing and feeling all the different kinds of hateful discrimination going on around them, and forced to merely keep reading more books, then their own lives remain endangered and frustrating. Thus, building more liberal sense-based democratic schools becomes even more important than trying to improve our national weaknesses. Much of the US and world is, in fact, still run with unequal and undemocratic feudalistic institutions, often using fear to force conformity. If you don’t do what we tell you, and accept what we give you, you’ll be fired or possibly even physically assaulted. As of yet, people don't have much power to improve such feudalistic corporations and governments, however, they do have some power to start improving their own conservative neighborhood schools, so children begin learning they don't have to merely accept the social status quo.
More About Intelligent Experimentation
Most all children enter the world already knowing how to cry and eat, but as they learn to experiment with their actions, their senses teach them how to satisfy their needs and wants. Many parents don't like to hear children cry, and so many children soon learn how to get parents to satisfy their needs and wants. In other words, most everything is learned through sense-based experimental trial and error, even on a subconscious level in small children. Parents are able to satisfy their children's wants and needs, and so a kind of dance begins to see who gets what they want, and children experiment to see how many wants they can satisfy. Thus what to laugh at, cry over, and eat always depends on those in their environment and the habits they encourage. If not for growing up in a family where everyone encouraged my learning, I probably would never have started reading Dewey’s work, or wanted to write these books.
Thus for many years our habits and feelings are the experimental results of such rewarding actions by the people around us, until children learn how to satisfy their needs and wants themselves. Thus their habits and will power begins growing, always based on sense-based experience, rather than mere reasoning and logic. They learn to use whatever actions work.
In our conservative schools today, however, children's active and natural sense-based experimental learning habits are greatly restricted to learning academic facts. And, what's more, when children enter school without a reading habit it's like entering another world, completely foreign and strange to them. Thus, they have unnatural feelings for school and learning itself. It's often a place to get out of, rather than go to, and what's more, most people never realize that's exactly what many conservatives want. The less young folks know about our world and what's going on in it, the easier it is for them to keep increasing their control over it, and keep taking peoples' money from them. In the Washing Post edition of 7-24-13 Harold Meyerson has a marvelous article about how some corporations have learned to keep taking more of the public's money merely by controlling certain natural commodities like aluminum!
Many of our few powerful corporations controlling much of economic life, and our small super-rich class and their faithful politicians, in general want students learning academic book trivia and little else, especially not excellent character or learning about what's happening here and now. President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind educational model is further evidence of a conservative educational plan. As a result, for many students the worst part of the academic year is the few days they’re forced to take standardized tests. As we've seen, pre-adolescent children simply don't have the same logical and thinking powers older students have. And, the US certainly isn't alone in equating educational excellence with such test and grade results. Many governments around the world want students who are obedient and do what they’re told, so they too demand all students play the academic test and grade game too. Thus the adult world many students enter often feels like another foreign place; they have few practical democratic skills of respect to live in that world, either for themselves or for others. It wouldn't be nearly so macabre if conservatives didn't then turn around and complain about the government having to take care of those people with welfare, unemployment benefits, and food stamps.
In a very real sense, then, conservative book-centered schools continue promoting the separation of sense knowledge from academic book facts. As a result, their knowledge is five miles wide and an inch deep, so to speak. Before going to school what children learn is sense-based knowledge; on a feeling level they’re intimately connected to their world. They actively learn what tastes good and what doesn't, what feels good and what doesn't, and so on, but not the results of their actions. Then, as they progress through a conservative learning program at school, given more and more academic facts, they're slowed separated from their senses and contact with the natural world of current events. To put it plainly, it's a kind of monastery education. It's reduced to learning more and more book facts, and if they do get a chance to study chemistry and physics, the sense experiments are so abstract and removed from daily life, they add little depth to their knowledge of living intelligently outside of school.
Again, the liberal educational conclusion seems obvious: the sooner young folks learn to CONSCIOUSLY feel and play intelligently with experimental learning about what's going on in their own world, the easier it'll be to keep improving those communities and in the process keep improving their own democratic character habits. If not, if they don't begin connecting themselves to the world they already live in on a feeling and sense-based level, then the more vulnerable they’ll become to their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts, as well as seeing more of their own neighborhoods decay and rot when corporations move their jobs to other countries, or keep wages low and executive pay obscenely high. That's the kind of logic we liberals want more students to feel and use.
In fact, actively experimental sense-based learning has helped create our new scientific age. With it more people than ever before have become less vulnerable to disease and poverty. As a result, many parents may think their children are already learning about experimental testing in school, but that is simply not the case. And so they’re not learning to practice it outside of classrooms and school yards, to make their own habits more healthful and their own neighborhoods safer? That's the educational reality more parents should be asking about. Even after college I don’t recall any teacher ever even suggesting all the best learning is constructively experimental and should be used to even help those less well off than myself! They continued giving me more books to read and more abstract papers to write. Thus, it took years to reconnect myself with my sense-based world and finally realize experimental learning is our only learning art, useful even in daily life to solve everyday problems and challenges. As a result, my own habit of intelligently questioning how excellent my own habits were remained very weak for many years, and they in turn helped make my life more frustrating and less fulfilling.
In a feudalistic-democratic dollarocracy like ours, where huge corporations generally control much of life itself for their own profit, the sooner students learn to experiment constructively in their own neighborhoods, and also feel what unequal rights are like, the less need they'll feel to continue allowing such corporations to keep increasing their power, break the law to make a living, or turn to illegal drugs or high-calorie foods to relax and make life less stressful.
Such schools are definitely possible! Some exist even today, like the Dalton School in New York. So we Deweyan liberals are not being utopian! No doubt, some conservatives will say such schools really be too expensive to build; and we just don't have the funds these day. But just saying things like that shows an ignorance of our own educational history! In 1916, when Dewey and his daughter Evelyn wrote Schools of Tomorrow, there were already many districts around the country already experimenting with such a progressive sense-based education model, from New York, to Indiana, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. And what's more, they continued growing until the Great Depression hit and school funding plunged as people lost their jobs and homes. Many such schools hung on through World War 2, but with the space race they were all but eliminated from the public sector. What's more, how many folks today can afford to send their children to such private schools, given the tremendous amount of debt people and countries have today? Greedy financiers needing a fix for their own money addiction have been selling home mortgages to most everyone, and a Republican president has been fighting not one, but 2 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without raising taxes to pay for them! In fact, President Bush 2 actually cut taxes, and thus increased the national debt for everyone while heartless conservatives talked about cutting government spending even more! It’s yet more sense-based evidence for the extremes some politicians and wealthy conservatives will go to keep restricting the spread of more liberal schools teaching democratic habits like equal rights and opportunities for everyone! They’re already working in many states to restrict voting rights as well.
So, we Deweyan liberals don't expect much federal education help, but that certainly doesn't mean more isn't available to build such schools on a neighborhood level. What's needed most of all is the freedom from our educational laws stifling their growth. In fact, such liberal sense-based experimental schools are needed today more than ever before, even more than they were needed in the early 1900s, during the Progressive Movement.
Once, when I mentioned the importance of experimental learning to some senior high students, it was as if they were hearing it for the first time. Even advanced students like themselves were simply given more book-facts to learn, rather than more intelligent habits to practice in the real world! Their reaction was what? Experimenting with socially useful work? Build character excellence? Such feelings are not only educationally tragic, but they're socially tragic as well. Why shouldn't even grade school children be learning such experimental habits, like learning to intelligently grow useful community gardens to help lessen expensive food bills, rather than relying on Food Stamps or government funds? And such practical sense-based knowledge can then become a much better base for more abstract high school studies like chemistry and botany. The ugly truth is simply this: The less primary students are taught about intelligent experimental possibilities here and now, the less power they'll have for making real and lasting improvement in life, and thus stay less dependent and helpless throughout their life. Don’t kid yourself; ignorance of experimental intelligence is not bliss; in fact IGNORANCE ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE AND NOW IS HARMFUL TO EVERYONE EXCEPT THOSE USING THEIR MONEY TO KEEP TAKING MORE OF THE PUBLIC'S MONEY. The more that happens, the less money people have to enjoy life. How many Wall Street workers are just flat-out greedy, and feel like J. P. Morgan once said: I owe the public nothing! Don't ideas like that keep echoing right out of the feudalistic Middle Ages, when landed aristocrats controlled much of life? So, good ol' J. P. kept using his huge fortune to buy art objects and build museums to house them, while millions remained woefully underpaid, undereducated, and unskilled. Many medieval barons and earls basically felt the same way. Morgan got a multimillion dollar inheritance from his father.
Encouraging students to merely focus on learning more book-trivia does have at least one good social result: it helps create audiences for game shows to see how much trivia some people have learned! And where there's an audience there're flashy and sensual ads selling more cars and cosmetics. I'm hopeful, however. I believe one day such shows will tell people what worthy democratic causes our corporations support with their profits! We Deweyan liberals are optimistic if nothing else. Wouldn't such knowledge help young folks realize there's more to life than making as much money as soon as possible, dealing drugs, gambling, knowing what bankers to bribe to launder drug money, and where to get more guns to kill rival gang members for more drug territory?
If, for example, junior high students want to exercise all day and play sports, then why shouldn’t they ‘pay’ for it with some intelligent community service work first? Otherwise our own public schools promote learning academic trivia and educational slavery in the 'land of the free'! Nature has so far allowed and encouraged us humans to be learning creatures all through life; children too are naturally curious and so can learn to like a life of continual learning. So, why not teach them what such experimental intelligence actually feels like? In fact, in his classic Democracy and Education Dewey wrote about many of these ideas over 80 years ago, but his academic style of writing makes reading his work rather difficult today. It's another reason I wanted to write this book with simpler words and ideas, so more people could learn about these important ideas. With them it will be easier for people to start turning their conservative neighborhood schools into more liberal democratic ones, where the fine ideals Thomas Jefferson wrote about are actually practiced, rather than ignored.
Education Reform??
Sure, there have been many reform movements since the 1950s. But in general, real meaningful debate about what our schools should be teaching, and how such subjects should be taught, has been almost non-existent. the public has been kept distracted by war after war, and economic crisis after economic crisis. So, the big educational debate these days seems to be how much academic trivia should we teach students and how much should standardized test scores be used to judge how good teachers are. Quite recently, however, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives actually voted to end the federal No Child Left Behind law and allow states to determine what students should learn and how they should learn it. But our Democratic president said he would veto that bill if it got to him. No doubt, he wants to keep teachers happy with the status quo, rather than give more educational power to the states. He may be right; there's no telling what some of our more conservative states would do to their public schools with that power.
On a national level, that's where much of the education reform debate is focused today, on who gets to control what book-facts children are made to learn, rather than on how we can make learning more sense-based, enjoyable, and experimental for students. But, as we've already seen, neighborhood educational reform is still possible. And, as more and more people find it difficult to even get a good-paying job, and college becomes more expensive, there's all the more need to start building such schools, and unleash the power of our students. At present, school for many people is merely a place to drop the kids off so they can get to work. After all, they went to the same kinds of schools, so they must be OK.
As we've seen many times already, there are several continuing social problems if we don't start making our schools more user-friendly places for students. Rising rates of obesity, pollution, global warming, crime, youth and adult unemployment, drug abuse, spouse abuse, corporate control of the economy, and political deadlock are a few of them. Our schools may not be able to completely solve all such problems, but isn’t it worth experimenting with a more liberal educational model and see what its results are?
Such schools are not impossible to build, as the parents of Bridgeport, Connecticut are finding out there days. A recent (7-21-13) New York Times article told how parents are uniting to oust an overly conservative superintendent who evidently wants to continue teaching academic book facts to its students who are around 90% Hispanic and African. For the superintendent what's educationally most important is the old conservative model, rather than helping students learn some practical skills for life after graduation, rather than merely going out into a rapidly changing world with no practical skills at all.
As is becoming more obvious all the time, mere reason and faith alone cannot tell us what knowledge and skills are most useful for decreasing nature's evils and increasing its goods. So, the more a sense-based experimental testing habit-art is kept from children’s conscious use in real world situations, the more difficult it becomes to live life excellently, and to the fullest. Life will always present us with new fears and challenges to overcome; about that I have absolutely no fear! Democracy is an active form of governing, and so shouldn't education be teaching such intelligent forms of action? In fact, life is challenging liberal parents, students, and teachers to help build better schools; one new, exciting, and very active group is called the Working Families Party. They can be a big help to anyone who wants to start making their neighborhood schools more student-centered, rather than book-centered.
The All-Important Freedom to Face Problems Here and Now
As we've seen, such liberal ideas are not new. The Sophists and often Socrates taught others to build practical skills and knowledge. In Corinth, for example, sophists like Antiphon opened a guidance counseling clinic to help people with their personal challenges, and of course Socrates too helped people solve their personal problems. One day someone told him some female relatives had recently moved into his house, and he didn't know how he was going to support them all. Socrates simply suggested he put them to work spinning and weaving more clothes, sell them, and thus help pay for their room and board! It was just an experimental idea, but when tested it worked fine. Socrates didn't need sociological and deep philosophic knowledge to give his fellow Athenians practical advice; he just needed his sense-based knowledge to see how women can learn more useful habit-arts.
And of course Protagoras the Sophist too saw how undereducated young Greek men were often taken advantage of in court by those who knew how to argue well and persuade jurors, often with tears and emotional appeals. So he began offering classes to those wanting to learn more about the useful art of logical thinking and talking. Wouldn't such problem-solving-work in the real world help students realize not only how important experimental thinking is, but also build their character excellence about what's going on here and now? And wouldn’t it give them some real knowledge when they do study sociology or philosophy in college?
We Deweyan liberals say again, even young students should be free to start learning more about what's going on here and now in the real world, and also intelligently use an experimental problem-solving habit-art. Both kinds of knowledge are very useful for improving any kind of weak, excessive, and unhealthful situation or habit. The basic form of all intelligence is to accept a challenge, imagine and plan a way to solve it, and then test the plan.
No doubt many conservative might say we liberals are too optimistic; children just aren’t ready to start learning such an abstract habit-art. Well, we liberals say why don't we start testing that idea, and see how true it really is? So, the more parents, teachers, and students are free to start experimenting with the idea, the sooner we'll see the results it produces.
10. OVERCOMING CHALLENGES, SOLVING PROBLEMS
Living excellently in an always changing world means overcoming our challenges and problems with intelligent experimental testing. That fact of life should now be obvious to everyone. In fact, everyone feels the fact of experimental testing, at least subconsciously. And when such feelings become ideas those feelings rise to a conscious level of awareness. If, say, a child looks in a certain place for a favorite food and doesn't find it there, then it will simply try another place. In essence that's the same kind of learning scientists use in the lab; if one solution doesn't work, then another one is simply tried. And yet there’s a big difference between the 2 events, namely conscious intelligent experimenting! The scientist may know on a conscious level what might work better, whereas a child will often simply use trial-and-error actions, so its intelligence won't have much conscious depth to it.
Thus, the liberal educational challenge becomes bringing more of those subconscious feelings about experimentation to a more conscious level, and thus deepening student habits of intelligent testing. The more that happens, the more students learn where they can get more useful information to help make their experiments more likely to work, rather than less likely. In such liberal schools, then, intelligent computer use of the internet -- our electronic encyclopedia -- becomes a much more important learning tool. It can help narrow the choices students have for experimentally overcoming both their personal and social challenges. It can make building a plan of testing more intelligent than blind trial-and-error, and again, that kind of learning art is useful all through life, not just while one is in school. As a result, students may also being seeing why improving social weaknesses and excesses like racial bigotry and addictions may take longer than overcoming personal weaknesses, but in either case an learning method is the same -- experimentally testing ideas to see their results. What’s more, the results of some experiments may not be obvious at first, but still they are what smart people focus on learning more about.
A Little History
As US history shows, we have been traditionally slow to solve our social equal rights challenges, mainly because most of our schools continued ignoring teaching that basic democratic habit-art. As a result, racial discrimination has remained widespread in the nation. It's one thing to mention equal rights in a nation's founding documents, but it's a much bigger challenge actually teaching young folks how bad racial discrimination feels. Even 100 years after the Civil War racial discrimination was still a fact of life, not just in the South, but around the nation as well, and violence was often used to maintain that social status quo. Even today some states are still passing laws making voting more difficult for some people, rather than embracing the democratic feeling of equality. The very fact conservatives continue working to keep restricting voting rights shows how strong some habits can be, rather than acting more intelligently and building more liberal democratic schools.
As we've seen, in the human body-mind, habit-generating will power is built first in childhood, and then if the intelligent habit of looking at an action's results grows, it grows much later. Many people still feel the habits they learned as children should be preserved and defended at all costs, no matter what the social and personal results might be. That psychological reality of will power is yet another important reason liberal schools are crucially important to the growth of democratic ideals like equality, fairness, and the public good. Without such schools, homes, and churches teaching such habits, a medieval status quo would be even more widespread.
Down through US history many conservatives have been very practical; they too know how important schools are for maintaining the social status quo, and have thus controlled their schools at the local level. Only until very recently have schools become racially integrated at all, and often not very much at that. However, as the courts began dismantling the conservative 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ‘separate but equal’ social model, the federal government has become a much bigger player in the education field. But recently, however, for us Deweyan liberals the conservative No Child Left Behind federal law frankly goes much too far to keep a conservative educational system in place. Since when is educational excellence merely equated with standardized test scores and academic trivia, or teaching excellence for that matter? As we’ve been seeing, such schools in fact continue being another obstacle to building an even more democratic nation, where equal rights and opportunities are a reality, not merely an ideal.
Another serious social problem began growing in the late 1890s, as the Industrial Revolution began creating a small but powerful class of wealthy people. For many of them the main goal in life was simply making as much money as possible. As we’ve seen already, in many ways that social problem has become much worse in recent years. Many wealthy folks have gotten more control of our political system, thus making reform even more difficult than ever.
Before the Civil War cotton production all but sealed slavery into the southern economy. And after the war industrial manufacturing began adding a whole new set of social challenges, not the least of which was the creation of a number of anticompetitive monopolies, unsafe working conditions, and increased political corruption; often senate seats went to those who paid the most for them. But they, and many other unfair social challenges, all helped create the need for different kinds of social experiments to reduce wealth's power. No doubt, the greatest and most successful one was the creation of a liberal Progressive Movement in the early 1900s. People simply organized and concentrated their voting power and began intelligently experimenting with a number of more democratic ideas, like popular creation of laws and direct election of senators, just to mention two.
Recently, however, conservatives have managed to overcome some useful regulations, making it even easier to satisfy their addictive quest for more and more economic and social power. So today, we liberals are again facing another serious social challenge of learning what intelligent experiments will help re-regulate our small wealthy upper class and corporations from creating more social instability, as well as controlling more and more political power. In other words, what experiments will help make life less feudalistic and more democratic? It’s still a work very much in progress.
Merely those 2 social challenges help make life itself more precarious and unstable for everyone else! For example, conservative President Reagan helped reduce the reasonable 1970s tax rate for the wealthy, and until very recently it continued going down. Conservatives told people such actions were justified because the jobs they wanted were actually created by the wealthy upper class. No doubt, recent history has proved once again that idea simply hasn't worked, and so should not be experimented with any longer. Our wealthy upper class has never been wealthier, and yet unemployment is still well over 7% for white folks, and much higher than that for minorities.
As a result, more people are realizing that conservative economic experiment should be ended; it simply hasn’t produced the results conservatives said it would produce. On the contrary, our still highly unstable and greedy corporate capitalist system has continued reducing middle class size and power, and we keep seeing recessions every few years, some much deeper than others.
In the early 1600s, for example, people like Francis Bacon predicted experimental learning and testing would make it possible for mankind to enter a new age where natural knowledge would make life much more rewarding and satisfying for everyone. About experimental learning’s power to give us more useful knowledge about nature, he was exactly right. However, he greatly underestimated how strong a greedy will power was, and how much it would create monopolies used mainly to keep increasing their wealth, buy more mansions for themselves, build museums and art collections, and pass on huge inheritances to their children. As a result, corporate capitalism's social experiment produced huge fortunes for a few and near poverty for most everyone else. Bacon's vision was just too unrealistic.
Back To The Present
So, it should be fairly obvious by now. The more students are freed to begin feeling how experimentally intelligent habits can be used to solve such serious social challenges, improving the public good and building more liberal schools, the easier it'll be to both create and maintain a more democratic social system. In short, the more students are allowed to actively experiment with how to actually keep building a more user-friendly economy and political system, the easier it'll be to keep growing such a world. And, the more students consciously practice an intelligent experimental model of solving problems, the easier it'll become to keep practicing it all through life, lessening the chances of their remaining slaves to their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful impulses and instincts.
With such training in more liberal schools it'll also be much easier for young folks to enter the adult world running, so to speak, and create their own businesses, rather than merely waiting around to climb a 30 year corporate ladder or needing more education. No doubt, some will eventually get more education, but at least they’ll have more experience for their studies, so they’ll be more able to add new industries and products to life. So again, knowing how to experiment intelligently with business challenges becomes another very important liberal educational goal. No doubt, not everyone will want to go into business for themselves; some will go into the service sector. But the more practical business skills students have, including character development, the easier it'll be to start making some honest money.
In the feudal world children were told their class-based social system was really god’s will, and so life should remain like it is; the poor should continue growing the aristocracy’s food and fulfilling their other needs. Nearly everyone had been told god exists, and also church rituals made it feel real and right; even in China people were told the emperor was chosen by heaven to rule. But with the growth of experimental learning and testing, and its focus on justifying ideas by the actual results they produced, such conservative feudalistic habits have become much less accepted, as has the idea the wealthy will create jobs for everyone else. Many now openly mock that idea with the phrase ‘trickle-down economics.’ If anything, however, more and more money has been trickling up to the wealthy, rather than trickling down to the people!!
So, again, an important challenge for liberal democratic schools, homes, and churches today is teaching how all personal and undemocratic social weaknesses and excesses can be intelligently overcome with experimental kinds of testing! And on a personal level intelligent experimentation remains more important than ever before; it makes it more likely to keep practicing that learning art after school days are over.
Consciousness Raising
As we’ve seen, most of the time using experimental learning to overcome our personal challenges happens quickly and subconsciously. When we're hungry we simply feel like going to the fridge, or perhaps taking a class to begin learning a new skill; healthcare is one field where job growth is happening. But, actually making our local schools consciously teach the art of intelligent experimentation has become even more difficult thanks to the conservative No Child Left Behind law. It’s really a shame, merely because consciously learning to build that important experimental habit could begin even in the lower grades. Students could actually be told how they’ll learn an intelligent way to experiment with what they want to learn. And the more they consciously experiment with that learning art, the more their subconscious feelings will be brought a conscious level of awareness. In such schools future police officers will be eager to talk regularly with working officers, to help them deepen their understanding of their work and make their own experimental actions more intelligent! What’s more, when students and parents have a democratic freedom to learn what they want, something else crucially important will happen: They’ll become more emotionally involved with learning, rather than merely remaining mentally yoked to learning more and more book-facts. Experimental learning will also allow students to interact more constructively with the elderly community, thus deepening their own knowledge with the help of their experiences.
Thanks to our great new worldwide electronic web, it’ll also be easy to see how other students around the world are answering their personal and social challenges. Might their experiments also work in this country? If not, why not? Recently both Russia and China have abandoned a Marxist economic model of worker-owned cooperatives, and gone back to a mercantilist model of state economic controls, as was the European model in the 1500s. In China about 50,000 corporations are state-owned and subsidized, thus making them better able to compete with huge US corporations. What’s more, even our corporations are often subsidized with taxpayer dollars as well as given huge tax breaks; some huge corporations in fact have recently paid no taxes, even though they’ve made billions in profits! So, especially on the economic level, there’s now a great amount of experimentation going on around the world, and no one knows which one or ones will become most useful and produce the best social results for everyone. Why shouldn’t those students interested in economics start connecting to such events going on here and now?
Breaking It Down
No doubt, a very important part of any intelligent problem-solving art is learning to break down the process of improvement to a number of small baby-step obstacles, so they can be more intelligently overcome. Again, young folks learn that process on a subconscious level when they learn to first walk to the fridge before getting something to eat. And so, again, to bring those subconscious feelings to a more conscious level of understanding, our liberal schools and homes will help them see how every improvement challenge can be broken down to a series of smaller baby-steps, as it were. In the early 1900s, for example, our Progressive democratic movement was so successful at overcoming a number of political weaknesses largely because they first realized they needed to become organized at a local level; they started growing in places like Texas, and slowly kept growing as life became more stressful for more people. Within a few years 2 more constitutional amendments gave people a stronger democratic voice in how the country works. And Dewey too joined to make yet another small step towards democracy when he helped form the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920; it’s been helping protect constitutional rights ever since.
So, for us Deweyan liberals focus on teaching public school students how they can overcome both their personal and social challenges by breaking the process down to a number of small baby-step improvements. If they want to build, say, a more healthful diet they can begin making breakfast a more healthful event, and when that becomes a strong habit then take another small step with their lunch meals. Eventually they’ll begin seeing such an intelligent experimental process can be used to improve any habit, from smoking to drug use to excessive alcohol use to even making themselves a more optimistic and happy person! It’s all a question of intelligent baby-step practices!
The same baby-step method of learning can also be practiced on large social challenges as well. Those who are interested in working, say, to make their neighborhoods safer and more business-friendly can start going out into them, making models of them, and then breaking down the improving process one block at a time: what business might work in that block, where can we find someone to start experimenting on it, and how can we help make the building more attractive to other business people? Children can also practice such a small-step improvement process with academic skills like writing, reading, and math, making the process much more naturally active, much like they first learn about bicycles by actually learning to ride one. In such liberal schools how many children would actually start their own bike repair shop even before they graduate high school, and thus become more productive citizens. And, if they’re taught how to think creatively, and how to mentally see different kinds of bikes, then even such a business can be exciting and rewarding? Creatively experimenting with new handlebar shapes could be another small step in that process.
With such a breaking-down art even primary age students can begin learning how economics works in their own neighborhoods? How else can their economic experiments of improvement become more intelligent if they don’t have such information? Which clothing companies are paying their Chinese and Pakistani workers slave wages, and which are staying here and using US workers? And how can we get such public-minded businesses in our neighborhoods? Why shouldn’t young students begin learning how to spend their money as wisely as corporate CEOs? What better way is there to make our corporations more public minded and user friendly? Also, how can we make it less dangerous to work in neighborhood liquor and convenience stores? These are, indeed, challenging times for people all over the world as corporations continue getting more and more economic power. Our liberal schools can help students improvement such a situation with intelligent experimentation broken down into a series of small baby-step improvements. How many liquor stores should we allow in our neighborhoods? Aren’t those the kinds of questions they’ll face as adults?
With the huge growth of corporate power since 1980, important new personal and social challenges are growing these days. In education, for example, future teachers and parents might start asking themselves how good are the new so-called Charter Schools, what are they teaching and what results are they producing in students? Are they putting more students in touch with their neighborhoods, and helping them experiment intelligently with improvements, or are they merely giving students more and more book-facts to memorize for the next standardized test? Are they actually teaching students some important character habits, like respecting good laws, or merely ignoring them altogether? Are they aiming mainly at making as much money as possible for their investors, or at helping teachers improve students and communities? In short, are they using conservative or liberal educational models?
Eventually even junior high students can begin learning much more about geography and world affairs as they continue learning about what students are doing in their schools. What’s happening to students in places like Singapore, Moscow, and Beijing? Are they enjoying school, or dreading it? Are book-oriented schools dominant there too? The more our schools merely focus on having students, say, merely memorize the names of those important cities, they more they actually keep distracting students from learning what’s actually going on in them. Thus, the more shallow and one-dimensional education becomes; learning gets all its vital sense-based energies and feelings sucked out of it, rather than deepening student knowledge with real interactive kinds of events. Shouldn’t every neighborhood US school be connected to similar students around the world, so their conscious world knowledge continues growing and deepening? What is happening here and now in Russian and Chinese schools; and what baby-steps might they experiment to give them more learning freedom and choice? Can’t such student experiments begin helping each other to make life more enjoyable, educational, and democratic; and if not, why not?
With the growth of huge powerful corporations it’s also become easier to keep abusing our environment and not pay for such damages. Only in the early 1970s was a federal Environment Protection Agency created, so seeing such actions are practiced on a neighborhood level can be another useful student activity in liberal schools. What small baby-steps can we make to learn more about what’s going on in our own neighborhood? Corporate records could become more public, as well as any dangerous social results of their actions. Why shouldn’t students learn to see their own neighborhoods like the movie Erin Brochovich? In fact, environmental pollution is a reality in many areas. Not only is non-recyclable garbage becoming more of an environment challenge, but so is global warming.
Such activities would also become a great way for students to start learning about the last billion years of natural evolution? For example, during the so-called Carboniferous Era, beginning more than 350 million years ago, and lasting for more than 70 million years, lush forests and plants grew for tens of millions of years, trapping carbon and eventually becoming coal and petroleum. As a result, the US is now the 'Saudi Arabia' of coal, having about a 300 year supply of it buried underground. But how much damage will happen to our earth if we keep allowing it to be burnt, releasing more carbon dioxide into the air? For the high energy-using US and China, such questions are important to students; it’s the world they’re growing into, so why shouldn’t they have a say in what it will look like? And so, what small improvement steps call they start taking here and now? How can a very complex social challenge be broken down into smaller steps, like asking their parents to walk more to the store, and use bicycles more too? If not, and global warming continues, then cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco may soon look like another Venice and start sinking into the ocean, not to mention many other places around the world. Will students have to swim to school? Such future-oriented learning is really at the core of all intelligent experimentation. Conservatives know it too; they continue experimenting with voter restriction laws hoping the result will keep conservatives in power.
What’s more, what will be the result if the US cuts down on selling more coal to China, to power its many new factories to help raise their millions of workers out of poverty? How many coal miners will lose their jobs, and what new ones can be created? Why shouldn’t students in places like coal-rich West Virginia begin looking into the future and accepting such challenges, rather than keep ignoring the future and thinking they’ll get a good paying coalmining job after they graduate? With the growth of liberal schools and teaching the habit of intelligent experimentation, the entire focus of education shifts from merely learning more useless historical facts and academic skills, to learning about the present and the future. In such schools students may not learn about Julius Caesar or Martin Luther, but they’ll have a much stronger habit of looking into the future, and then making the present easier to live through that future.
Future vs. the Past
Here’s a trivial example of what I mean. How many times have you seen people waiting for a bus or a supermarket cashier, and not thinking at all about how they’ll pay for their fare or groceries until they get on the bus or after their groceries are totaled up? There they were, daydreaming and fantasizing before the bus arrived, and not even thinking ahead 5 or 10 minutes about what they’ll need! The more our conservative schools keep students from learning how to think about the future and see what they can do now to prepare for it, the easier life will become for everyone. To we want to, say, wait for years before the city fills in some pot holes, or do we want to make such simply repairs ourselves? In too many ways our conservative schools continue keeping students disconnected from life here and now, and actively preparing for the future. It’s as if the future isn’t that important, or knowing what skills and knowledge might be useful to know. And that’s just a trivial example. Imagine how much future pain and suffering people would avoid if they began thinking about their dental or health habits here and now, and feeling how excellent ones will help make their future much easier.
Shouldn’t more young folks be asking themselves what are the future results of simply pouring more carbon into the atmosphere while they drive around for no other purpose except to drive around? Why shouldn’t even young students become more aware of possible future events, and also begin experimenting with reducing their own energy uses? Wouldn’t that be a great way to keep increasing their environmental consciousness and excellence? After all, within a few decades they will inherit such a world. Why shouldn’t they too be encouraged to focus more on experimenting in their workshops with so-called 'green energy' sources? 'Green' solar and wind power industries are growing, especially in Europe and China, helped of course by the government? In Germany 'green' industries are already second only to their auto industries in employees, according to a recent New York Times editorial. So, if history is any indication of the future, as our earth continues heating up more and more, wealthy folks may simply start moving to places like Greenland and Canada while the rest of the world fights over what food and water remains! It’s happened before. Many wealthy American colonists moved to the New World to have more economic opportunities in life, and eventually some of their descendants helped write a constitution to make money-making in the nation easier for them.
Feeling such important social challenges, and breaking them down to see what they might do to help improve them, like using more renewable human energy, can begin growing even at the primary school level. Youngsters typically ride their bikes to school, and so bike safety, repair, and laws become much more important knowledge to them than knowing how to divide 3 digit numbers by 2 digit numbers. It’s dull and boring work, and it keeps the next generation ignorant about more useful knowledge and facts, especially future possibilities. Why shouldn’t learning to intelligently recycle our garbage and old electronic gadgets be taught in schools? Isn’t that useful knowledge for young folks, and isn’t it becoming more important than ever before? The question is: How quickly can parents, teachers, and students focus their intelligent energies and begin putting students of all ages in touch with what’s going on in our world here and now, and thinking more about what they do to make the future more meaningful and satisfying?
We Deweyan liberals say it’s most important to teach students how to intelligently begin actively attacking new challenges, rather than merely reading about them once a week. After all, making our world less ancient and medieval is much more important than reading about it. And the best way for that to happen is to help them feel what those worlds were like and how badly people were often treated in them, but also start working to end such modern day actions. Teaching such intelligent habits in our schools, homes, and churches are the best way democracies grow and remain strong. Otherwise greedy corporations will continue acting like medieval aristocrats, and making life quite stressful for most everyone else. Often they justify such actions by telling themselves they are really superior people, and so deserve a better life. It’s been a useful idea for thousands of years. Conservative and moderate Greeks like Plato and Aristotle told themselves much the same kinds of things.
Making our democracy less vulnerable to huge corporate power and those with personal fortunes is, perhaps, the most important social challenge. Wealthy and powerful industrial CEOs often hire lobbyists to slow and stop new and tougher pollution laws, sometimes for decades, as well as reduce peoples’ power to sue them for personal damages they might cause! Some may even fight against better healthcare models because it’ll mean less profit for them. As we’ve seen above, it's been happening with US healthcare now for about 100 years; the American Medical Association has been working against socialized healthcare ever since Teddy Roosevelt first started talking about the idea in the early 1900s! Even the Republican candidate for president in 2012 proudly said he will immediately repeal the new healthcare law helping insure millions more people, even though it’s similar to the one he himself helped pass in Massachusetts! So, shouldn’t even primary age students start learning about such current events, and how to intelligently experiment to improve them? What’s more important to know, how to eat healthy and nutritious food and exercise intelligently, or how to multiply and divide mixed numbers, round off decimals to the nearest ten thousandth, and know what lower leg bones are connected to the upper leg bone? To make all students learn such useless facts is more a form of educational slavery than educational excellence.
In more liberal homes, parents too will often ask their children what current challenges they learned about today, either personal or social, and how they can be experimented with intelligently, so life will become less dangerous and more satisfying? The more we empower students to practice those kinds of small intelligent baby-step experiments, the less they’ll need to rely on their politicians and corporations to solve their challenges, and the easier it’ll be to keep using their tax money to keep improving life. No matter what the activity, there’s always room for improvement; it’s a never ending challenge. The educational challenge, however, is to start teaching young folks how to enjoy and have fun making such improvements; it makes experimental learning that much easier.
11. PASSIVE AND ACTIVE EDUCATION
Basic Differences
Another easy way to describe the general difference between conservative and liberal educational models is with the words passive and active. In this section with those 2 words we'll continue deepening the meaning of those 2 models.
Being book, idea, and teacher-centered, the conservative model can be described as basically passive, much like contemplative reasoning was celebrated by conservatives since Plato's day. Passive education is usually what goes on in public schools today; it’s basically reading and writing quietly, much like monks did in the Middle Ages when they copied their sacred texts. Many religious mystics were even more radical; they didn't read or write, but merely tried passively feeling and uniting with what they were told was the Ultimate Truth in nature; Plato called them Spirit-Ideas and Christians called it god.
Today, public school students usually sit passively at their desks day after day doing book-assignments, often about subjects they have little interest in, need to know, or use for outside of school. Thus, normally active and experimental children find such learning strange and some even act disruptively in class. What's more, for Dewey, that passive conservative model itself is basically shallow, artificial, and to a great extent unnatural, especially when compared to the more active sense-based kinds of intelligent and constructive experimental learning they use in everyday life. Such active experimentation is what's natural to children, and so there's more of an emotionally felt connection to what they learn. In fact, outside of school most everyone is learning with active experimentation, like riding a bike, skateboarding, or preparing a business presentation for some clients. So, in the real world learning is always active, sense-based, individualized, and centered on personal interests; even lawyers are active learners, as are doctors and politicians. So, at least in those ways a passive conservative reading and writing learning model is unnatural, shallow, and artificial. Scholarly Dewey said it like this:
“… ordinary, direct, and personal experience of the child shall furnish problems, motives, and interests that necessitate recourse to books for their solution. Otherwise the child approaches the book without intellectual hunger … (routine) dependence upon books weakens and cripples vigor of thought and inquiry, (provides) mere random stimulation of fancy, and flight from the world of reality into a make-believe (mental) land.” (S&S, 112; additions are my own)
As a result, conservative book-oriented schools remove the whole democratic process of individual choice in the learning process. Students are merely given assignments to work. Educational writers and professors help pass laws telling teachers what they think all students should learn, rather than allow student and parent democratic choice to grow and strengthen. Thus, they get little feeling for their own questions and interests, or what's called character development. On a formal level it's all but ignored in conservative public schools. As a result of such passive learning, the entire feeling side of the growing human psyche remains shallow and immature, as is the felt depth of their knowledge. Is it any wonder, then, school drop-out rates are often anywhere from 30% to 50%, and about 70% of students don’t even go to college, much less graduate? To us liberals those kinds of numbers are yet solid evidence the passive conservative educational model is not meeting student needs for active, constructive, and enjoyable learning experiences! And of course taxpayers are paying for the unproductive results of passive learning model.
In liberal schools, however, while children are actively learning more about what they want to learn, they're getting a much deeper feeling for their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. And with more active service learning projects they're also beginning to feel how the public good can keep growing. Even allowing, say, students to actively read to elderly adults, or help them exercise, would be a much more intelligent way to learn those valuable skills. Older folks know what good reading sounds like, and so could offer some constructive criticism. So, not only would students actively improve their reading skills, but they would also learn more about the elderly, and perhaps even begin learning how important their personal diet and exercise habits are in life. The elderly are often a wealth of experiential knowledge based on all their senses, not just their knowledge of book facts.
Just the other day I saw a young woman carrying a World Geography book home, but for us liberals geography would become a much more meaningful study if students actively went out into their neighborhoods and wrote their own geography books about them, including the drawings as well!? Wouldn’t that kind of active, holistic, sense-based artistic knowledge make it easier to plant trees that don’t eventually turn sidewalks into hill-climbing challenges, or keep wasting precious water to keep them alive? We say such active learning projects would make it much easier for students to start making real contributions to their neighborhoods with, say, building more gardens and parks, and wouldn’t it be better for teachers too to get out into the neighborhood and get some healthful exercise too? And, wouldn’t it be easier for students and teachers to begin feeling more pride in their neighborhoods, and as something to cherish, rather than ignore or rely on the government to rehab?
There’s another reason a more active learning model might be useful. Since computers were invented in the 1970s the workplace has changed dramatically. There’s much less need for workers who stay at their desks filing papers and recording business data. One person can now use a computer to record and store more data than ever before. As a result, there’s less need for workers to stay at their desks all day and keep reading and writing, and more need for people who know how to keep intelligently building more useful and productive public spaces. In short, for us Deweyan liberals active sense-based experimental schools make it easier to teach students how to think and plan creatively, as well as actively test their ideas, rather than merely doing what a teacher or corporate supervisor tells them to do? Some corporate workers have such weak and greedy characters they’ll even break the law and spend time in jail rather than disobey a supervisor.
Again, liberal and progressive schools take a more actively naturalistic approach to learning, where body-mind activities build feelings as well as ideas – the 2 major parts of the human psyche. If, say, a student or students want to build the skill of running a mile in under 7 minutes, they’ll be helped by the teacher to build a creatively intelligent baby-step plan, and then start actively testing it to see its results. For example, they’ll walk a mile and time it, then run one lap and time it, and so on, carefully building up their body-mind to their 7-minute goal. Such actively experimental projects are basically how any constructive project is built, and so for Dewey such intelligent experience is the best teacher! The great social weakness of such work, however, has been its use mainly to increase personal fortunes, rather than the public good. Thus our government has needed to grow larger in order to balance and regulate the growing amount of concentrated economic power. Without such regulation our society would undoubtedly look much more feudalistic than it already now is.
What’s more, once such liberal schools are complete, such an active learning model can be used in all classes. In fact many expensive private schools already have such an active learning model in place. At universities like Cal Tech, for example, students regularly build robot models to accomplish some task, thus using they book ideas constructively. Making such active experimental projects available to public schools students, however, remains to us Deweyan liberals the great modern educational challenge. They're not enough students, parents, teachers, and politicians demanding such schools be built. Much of the current educational debate centers on which kind of school we want kids taught more and more book knowledge, public or charter schools.
Such active kinds of learning projects also make good psychological sense? They're really the best way to grow and increase intelligent subconscious impulses and instincts, while decreasing dangerously destructive feeling. The more students actively feel how unhealthful, say, impulses are for eating refined sugar and carbohydrates, the easier it becomes to relax such muscular impulses and then make more intelligent food choices, especially since more than 30% of adults now have elevated blood pressure.
In short, actively constructive experimental learning projects and their healthful feelings help liberate students to think more intelligently for themselves and thus better guide their own growth. I still remember vividly the tree I planted in junior high for Arbor Day, and over 50 years later I still vividly remember the end-table lamp and letter opener I built in home-ec class, and the cooking I did as well. Why shouldn’t students get to feel such constructive learning experiments throughout their school careers? Plants use atmospheric carbon to grow. With the growing threat of global warming there’s a whole world of serious challenges to intelligently cut down on carbon pollution, including getting out of their cars and walking of biking more often. And they’re even more serious because our planet is the only habitable one for many billions of miles around! If we don’t start teaching young folks what a healthy planet looks like, and how to intelligently care for it, then civilization itself will become all but impossible for most everyone.
Being more active oriented, liberal schools thus have more workshops where students can more easily begin feeling what intelligent work is like. In fact, it can be more like an enjoyable ballet than anything else. Why shouldn’t some students be free, say, to build their own wardrobe in a clothing shop, or even shoes in a shoe shop? Isn’t that honest work, and profitable too? Wouldn’t such shops be a great way to hold down clothing expenses for the poor? In truth, such liberal schools are ours for the molding, but they too will take a little intelligent experimentation to build them one grade at a time. Such schools are certainly not a place where book-facts and reliable scientific information are neglected. On the contrary, they’re still celebrated as our strongest knowledge. However, all such facts are not treated as if they’re the best and only educational goal, but rather seen as helpful tools when building and testing intelligent plans of action.
Such an active educational model was largely the result of Dewey's experimental school at the University of Chicago in the 1890s; it was simply called the Lab School and it's still active to this day. However, here’s a word of warning based on my own school career. The projects we built were separated from an intelligent learning process; the lamps and foods built were treated as an end in themselves! In other words, what I was learning about cooking or lamp-building wasn’t anchored to any kind of scientific facts about diet or electricity, or connected to any intelligent plan-building skill before I started working. The Home-ec teacher just said build a lamp, and so we started working. As a result, it did little to increase and deepen my interest in science, or how to intelligently make a plan before starting a project. Electricity, say, wasn’t talked about, but rather just something passing through wires, and food just tasted good or bad, rather than learning what different foods actually do in our bodies. In short, there was little holistic and connected approach to knowledge. Later on in the 70s and 80s a team-teaching model of education was experimented with, but as far as I know it didn't grow very much. How could it when it remained on merely a mental level of awareness?
A Harmful Psychic Division
The conservative and moderate models of passive learning went back to ancient and medieval times. In order to convince people their political and religious leaders really did know absolutely certain Truth, learning had to remain on merely a mental level of awareness. After all, on an active experimental level of learning there was no objective evidence such eternal objects existed! Thus, both Plato and Aristotle helped artificially divide the human psyche. With their psychological models reason and thinking was cleanly divided from sense-based experimental knowledge. The reasoning and idea half of the human psyche was used to justify and convince people such eternal objects existed, rather than seeing ideas as tools for liberating intelligent human experimental testing. Such a dividing thus made it easy to control people; without believing or practicing such ideas people might be condemned to eternal punishment.
Aristotle artificially named active and passive psychic faculties. The reasoning and thinking faculty was aimed at producing eternal Truth, and was said to be completely different from the sensing faculties where practical habits were learned. Such practical habits taught people useful skills for the real world, while a passive contemplative reasoning faculty could help grasp nature's eternal and unchanging Truth. For Plato such eternal objects were Spirit-Ideas, and Aristotle called them natural Forms. Because he wanted to say his ideas were absolutely True, Aristotle was determined to create active and passive learning faculties. He impulsively wanted some ideas to be absolutely certain Truth! Our senses passively absorbed images from out there and after enough were absorbed then an active thinking faculty could reason about the eternal Forms inside our psyches and discover their eternal Truth. He even named 4 forms inside people: material, formal, efficient, and final. He even felt stones had a final form to always seek the earth’s center, thus they always fall when dropped. Thus an inbuilt intuitive reasoning faculty became a part of the human psyche, and that kind of faculty psychology basically remained in place until the late 1700s, when Jean Rousseau’s more active sense-based model of learning began challenging it.
For Aristotle, the more we actively reason correctly with universal words like human and animal, then the more certain we can be of our own knowledge. All animals breathe air; humans breathe air, therefore it's absolutely certain all humans are animals. Thus he created his greatest work of philosophic art: a deductive logical model of thinking. And of course his teacher Plato assumed we were all born with such Spirit-Ideas already in our psyches, thus making reasoning and contemplative thinking infinitely more important than sense-experience was for Aristotle. Both Plato and Descartes merely elevated contemplative reasoning to producing our strongest knowledge. For Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ was absolute Truth, as was his math work; they were felt to be god’s eternally True ideas. For conservatives like Plato, such active and experimental sense knowledge merely distracted people from the quest for absolute Truth, as it had been for homeless-looking Socrates too.
Those kinds of conservative and moderate psychological models seemed to fit observations too. They saw children normally spending years passively looking and listening, rather than experimenting, and so to Aristotle it seemed reasonable to say children were absorbing nature’s eternal and unchanging Forms like animal and human, passively imprinting themselves in some mysterious way within the human reasoning faculty, pictured as a blank slate or tablet until it actually started thinking and contemplating. Moderate John Locke (d. 1704) liked such ideas. They helped satisfy both of their desires for discovering absolutely certain kinds of Truth, as well as challenge liberal kinds of thinking. However, exactly why there were so many different versions and models of absolute Truth was and continues being a serious problem for all conservatives and moderates. In truth, both Aristotle and Locke weren’t clear how such Truth is discovered.
Actually, such conservative and moderate attacks against liberals have been going on for centuries. Both Plato's and Aristotle’s faculty psychology attacked Protagoras’s liberal model of active learning. In effect, however, they helped close experimental science down as a useful tool for actively improving life for everyone and working for the public good. Science for them meant merely classifying animals and humans in different classes and species. People were born with a set of learning tools already set; some were born to be slaves, some business people, some soldiers, and a few to become political leaders. From Plato to the late Middle Ages conservative leaders actively censored any kind of liberal independent thinking and acting. Their conservative ideas about Truth and learning were to be preserved by any means possible; public executions were even used across Europe, many justified as burning devil-possessed people to save their souls, even women and children! Thus, the growth of useful experimental scientific knowledge and intelligent experimental learning remained almost non-existent from Aristotle until Galileo in the early 1600s. Even when Galileo boldly and confidently actively showed how wrong Aristotle was with many of his scientific ideas about nature and learning, the Catholic Church soon put him under house arrest, forbidding its members from even reading what he had written.
After 1600, then, science’s active experimental art of learning began blossoming, and the more impressive results it produced, the easier it was for Dewey to say Aristotle’s passive faculty model of learning was basically a spectator model of learning. It neglected completely the actively experimental learning and testing children and adults normally use every day to learn what they learn. So, a completely different model of learning needed to be built, and giving the senses a more organic role in a learning process. For Dewey, then, the senses became far from merely passive tubes for knowledge to travel through. On the contrary, sense energies actively stimulated interest in objects, and thus helped stimulate experimentation and testing actions. The more a child sees something colorful and interesting, the more they want to experiment with it.
Science itself also helped build Dewey's active learning model. The more science failed to discover any kind of eternal and unchanging objects to know about, the easier it became to build a much more active and naturalistic psychology he called Functional Behaviorism. In that model all ideas are the result of the habits we practice; we learn best and deepest what we actively experiment with! Some 2,400 years earlier Sophist humanists like Protagoras essentially came to the same conclusion, and so he too saw no need to artificially divide the human psyche into active and passive faculties! Learning is an actively holistic and organic body-mind process. However, because conservatives and moderates largely controlled educational systems, such a liberal democratic psychology was never allowed to grow even at the university level, until about 100 years ago. Thus, for us liberals the educational challenge is to keep putting an active art of experimental learning at the core of all liberal schools, just as it’s become the core of all adult learning.
Mental Faculties Become an Issue
For most of the 1800s a faculty psychology was the accepted model of learning. For religious medieval conservatives too a reasoning faculty was able to grasp spirit kinds of eternal Truth as well as eternal Natural Laws, and thus continue justifying their age-old quest for certainty. Even in the early 1800s Immanuel Kant thought Newtonian physics was nature’s absolute Truth based on his merely assuming time, space, and matter were unchanging and constant events! As a result, many continued believing we all have more or less separate eternal in-build psychic faculties; philosophers as different as David Hume (d. 1776) and Kant both assumed such a model was true.
No doubt when Aristotle looked at his own experience such ideas made some sense to him. When he came to Plato's Academy at 17 he knew little, and kept learning as he continued reading; Plato called him the reader. And the more he looked passively at, say, animals and plants, the easier it was to see how some could be grouped in the same Form-species. To him that kind of passive, contemplative, spectator learning model produced what felt like the best scientific knowledge, knowledge eternally and unchangingly the same! In a still young scientific world where sense-based experimental knowledge was just bubbling up to a conscious level of awareness, such a model of nature and the senses seemed obvious, even though he wasn’t exactly sure how learning about such objects actually happens.
Liberal Dewey, however, respected scientific evidence much more than conservatives and moderates, and so the senses became seen as always active and selective, not merely passive receivers of nature's truth. For him our senses are part of an always active and forward-moving body-mind, helped to become intelligent by a forward-looking reasoning habit-art focused on results. Even when crossing a busy street, searching for some peanut butter and jelly, or making our feudalistic political system more democratic and fairer for everyone, the senses help activate our thinking, rather than merely passively relaying data from the world. In short, human senses actively stimulate and help direct us experimentally to produce satisfying results in a constantly moving and changing nature! There simply isn’t any objective evidence for any eternal and unchanging psychic faculties or objects for our senses to know, or for a separate active reasoning faculty. In life both sensing and reasoning are skills of an organic body-mind, and so every idea needs to be actively tested for its reliability. Even scientists building planetary rovers do not know if their ideas will work until they're tested and the rover starts working! The more our schools keep ignoring such a learning model, the more immature and naïve children remain.
New active and experimental Behavioral psychologies like Dewey's helped students and educators begin feeling each of us is an active perceptual center of activity. We’re all individuals with different learning needs. Each one of us has their own interests and as long as they're not disrespectful or harmful those needs should be respected, especially in our public schools and prisons. How else can students or mis-educated prisoners learn to respect the democratic goal of equal rights and respect for everyone when such habit-arts aren't taught in our schools, homes, churches, and prisons?
So, if all that’s true, then the justification simply vanishes for all passively conservative and moderate learning models based on a faculty psychology. In short, why demand every student remain passively reading more book facts for 12 years, and thus keep them from beginning to know their own learning needs and how to satisfy them actively and intelligently with experimental testing? It’s the best way for both improving themselves as well as their own local world? In fact, all animals, even simple one-celled ones, are active creatures, responding throughout life to sense-energies with trial-and-error experimental actions, like looking for more food. Child studies too prove there is little passive absorbing of facts on their part. On the contrary, when they're awake their senses are almost constantly busy as they experimentally test interesting objects for their feel, taste, permanence, and friendliness. Even young toddlers are impulsively active, moving from object to object without knowing what is or isn't dangerous. Thus, such active naturalistic facts of learning continue challenging people to start seeing education outside the passively contemplative Aristotelian faculty box of learning. How can we build excellent schools if we don’t have a reliable psychological model?
With so much at stake in building more liberal democratic schools, conservatives and moderates naturally began attacking Dewey’s model of learning. Moderate Sigmund Freud said some psychic faculties were inbuilt at birth, while conservatives like Carl Jung said much the same thing. But the more Dewey’s model of learning was tested, the easier it became to see its reliable results. Children learned what they actively practiced, not what innate faculties directed them to learn. In fact, to this day many religious conservatives still want to believe there are eternal and unchanging objects in nature, and students should be taught what they are.
Thus passively oriented religious schools remain popular. Even in conservative public schools students often feel there are eternal and unchanging nature objects producing scientific Laws of Nature, like Darwin’s biological laws of survival; the weak perish and the strong survive. Such ideas have even been used to direct political actions as well; it’s called a laissez-faire model of government; even Thomas Jefferson said it was best. In the latter 1800s philosophers like Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Nietzsche said the government shouldn’t pass laws helping the poor and sickly; they should let nature’s laws of survival keep working. Millions of progressive liberals like Dewey, however, had a different way of looking at such eternal Truth, based of course on the results of passing such helpful laws; they helped increase the public good. What is truth? Even Newton's unvarying time, space, and matter have all been shown to vary in different systems.
Active Kinds of Creative Learning Projects
We thus come back to the topic of active learning projects. In more liberal schools, where experimental learning is a normal part of every day, workshops and imaginative creativity become much more important. With experimental learning the very important skill of creative thinking rests on this simple question: how can we improve the ordinary objects we see around us? How can we build a better can opener, vacuum cleaner, window washer, eye glasses, and even clothing? People often see such products advertised on TV; in liberal schools students are challenged with that question as often as possible. And such creative thinking isn’t linked only to social objects; it can also be used to question students’ own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits in psychology workshops. Not only will they begin seeing themselves more objectively, rather than just emotionally, but also begin growing a sense of adult excellence itself – helping those less fortunate, working smoothly and joyfully, and of course thinking experimentally. As we've seen, for Dewey creative imagination is the only habit-art separating us from all other creatures. No other creatures are as creative as we are, mainly because they don't have the speaking abilities we have to play and recombine words and ideas creatively. When some apes were taught to use sign language they creatively made new signs!
The more students begin feeling what creativity is like, and how that very important habit-art can keep growing all through life, the easier it becomes to keep intelligently changing and growing in an always-changing nature, both personally and socially. Sometimes even the Constitution needs to be creatively improved. So, the more students see how a weak habit of, say, reading can be improved with different kinds of practice, the easier it becomes to start actively testing those ideas, to see which ones feel best and produce the best results, and which don't. And, of course, the more that creative habit-art grows, the easier it is for students to begin feeling one of life's most important naturalistic ideas: down through history, any habit-art, be it mathematics, science, or even religion, is the product of creative thinking! Merely seeing a little of religion's history will start producing those feelings. No doubt, many conservative and moderate people will say such feelings are destructive to civilization itself, but for us liberals they really show people what amazingly creative creatures we humans can be! Lucretius's great liberal atomist poem On Nature celebrates the idea again and again. Human creativity is, for us liberals, our most useful habit-art, and one deserving to be taught in our liberal public schools along with intelligent experimental learning.
Such a creative habit-art also helps students begin seeing another way of looking at a very basic philosophic idea -- the definition of idea itself! What is an idea? Is it a mentally seeing into and grasping a world of unchanging objects or Laws, or is it merely a mental tool for making our own actions more intelligent and easier to think about future results? The more students begin seeing and feeling that idea-as-a-tool definition, the easier it becomes to think and reason more creatively to keep improving their own habits and neighborhoods! How can math ideas, for example, keep help making their schools more beautiful places to be, and how can psychological ideas be used to build a better reading habit-art? Who knows, some students may even begin imagining what a new religion might look like, and what its ideas would be; it's happened hundreds of times before!
In more active-learning liberal schools having, say, an experimental clothing work shop, clothing ideas too become something used to create their own kinds of clothes; clothing thus become a work of imaginative art itself! Why should clothing designers have all the fun with such ideas? Why shouldn't students too. The more teachers help students feel how creative imagination can work, the freer they’ll become to create the kinds of clothes they like, rather than merely spend their valuable dollars on paying what someone else says they should be wearing. In fact, in many public schools clothing uniforms have become a normal, but have you noticed the similarity between military uniforms and school uniforms? What are we allowing our children to be trained for with such uniforms, the next war? In reality, such uniforms deny students learning one of liberalism's most important habit-art, the art of intelligently building one's own individuality, and making students feel like unique and worthy people, rather than feeling they’re just another insignificant person! In fact, the whole idea of liberal education is to develop and empower one's creatively intelligent individuality, rather than ignore that habit-art. Democratic equal rights and opportunities thrive with such habits.
When is the last time you felt you could create a better looking piece of clothing, or invent a new food dish, or even a new branch of mathematics? And yet those objects are all the product of merely using ideas as imaginative tools. They all start with simple questions, like what would happen if I put this material over here, or changed this broom handle to this shape, or how to describe how an insect move on a ceiling? Such simple questions challenge people to think creatively. When a mathematician in the 1800s asked himself what geometry would look like if parallel lines could actually meet, it opened up whole new worlds of geometrical thinking about nature itself. Is our universe really curved positively or negatively? As we now know, it certainly isn’t flat like Euclid imagined. Why shouldn’t young students begin challenging themselves with such questions? Don’t smart people naturally ask themselves such simple questions; inventing the computer mouse people use today is the result of such challenging questions. The more students are allowed to ask such questions, then learning itself becomes an exciting adventure, rather than boring memorization; I've seen it happen in the classroom myself, and how much students enjoyed such creative thinking.
In fact all ideas can be creatively and experimentally played with, with the help of simple questions, even about gardening, policing, lawyering, judging, and writing new laws. What would a school look like if students were free to think about growing drought resistant plants, or what new laws might make our neighborhood a safer place to live and play in? With such active kinds of creative thinking, school becomes a much more exciting place to be, not to mention more educational as well! It all starts when students begin hearing that ideas are tools to be played with experimentally, rather than being merely something to read about and keep memorizing for the next test. In active learning workshops such habits are easy to grow.
No doubt, most students won’t build different geometric models of nature, or reinvent the wheel, but some just might invent a new tool for drawing angles, or a new auto wheel design people might want to buy. And once that kind of creatively imaginative thinking starts growing, and is even used to keep improving both one’s personal and social worlds, then school becomes a more vibrant and adventurous place to be. After all, everyone who can speak can learn to ask simple questions and even creatively think of different answers. Once learning becomes focused onto enjoying those kinds of actions, like, for example, what should a new neighborhood part look like, or how can we make our own classroom healthier with more plants, then our most powerful learning habit-art, actively intelligent and creative experimental learning, will be burned into student memories and muscles, and thus not as easily forgotten as mere academic facts.
Two Different Learning Models
Most everyone's familiar with education's goal of teaching the 3 Rs: readin', writin', and 'rithmetic. They're important for us Deweyan liberals too, but where we differ with conservatives is how they should be taught. For us, the answer is with intelligently active practice students discover for themselves, rather than being forced as a group. Students are ready to learn such skills at different times. For us, the 3 R’s can best be learned while students are actively working at improving not only their own habits, but also the surroundings both in and outside of school. In liberal schools they become a bi-product of the learning process; they become something to help build intelligent plans with, and help organize one’s thoughts so sharing with other students becomes easier and more enjoyable. In any case, however, they become anchored to creative work, rather than remaining tied to more and more boring and dull bookwork. Why not give students the choice between such learning models, and see which one they prefer? Isn’t that what democratic choice and respect is all about?
Some children start learning such skills as late as 9 or 10; some students start learning them earlier; and some learn only what they need. In any case, however, to take away a child’s naturally active learning model, where all their senses and muscles are working, and have them mainly sit at desks quietly working most of the day, frankly is disrespectful to student needs and also makes school a kind of prison. They're usually told where to sit, what to read, and what questions to answer. Shouldn't more people be asking what feelings for democracy and individual worth can students grow when they themselves go to undemocratic and regimented schools? In more liberal schools students are simply freer to make more meaningful learning choices for themselves! How much of adult anti-depressant use today is yet another result of dull and boring schools where students remain just another body, rather than a contributing member of society? Why should schools leave students with little or no desire to learn what they want to learn, either in school or when they’re adults? With more active and creative learning experiences, however, won't student skills like reading and writing be learned more naturally when they're asked to share their learning experiences with fellow classmates? In liberal schools good speaking habits will grow stronger than in silent and book bound classroom. Can't Fridays be report-giving days?
Instead of getting out into some workshops, and doing some actively constructive and helpful work with their ideas and facts, students are often merely given summer reading lists with no purpose other than just to read more books. Often the only social use they see from their reading is, perhaps, getting their principal to perform some bizarre stunt the children find amusing, like shaving one’s head. As a result, reading and learning useful facts stays cut off from any kind of personal or social benefit, thus remaining merely a way of passing time. And often our social institutions don’t help either. Many leaders at every level of society want young folks to remain passive and obedient; it makes running a business, a political system, a spying system, and a war that much easier and more profitable. People who are disobedient and dare expose those who are breaking the law are quickly made a traitor and sometimes thrown into jail for decades! To us liberal Deweyans that is definitely not how an intelligent democracy works! Such obedience habits begin growing when children are made to act in certain ways, and punished when they don’t. However, when reading and writing become a way of sharing knowledge with others, like, say, reading to elderly people and younger students, then a much deeper and more meaningful knowledge and community feeling is learned.
In a liberal primary school, for example, students would find it much easier to write about how they intelligently used scientific knowledge about, say, fertilizers, to creatively grow some flowers faster for the school grounds, rather than merely sitting at their desks passively coloring flowers in a coloring book. In short, the more children are free to actively experiment with socially useful skills, the deeper and more mature their feelings AND ideas for their work and their communities become! And also, the deeper becomes their respect for intelligent work and reliable scientific facts. In fact, in liberal schools, why shouldn't students be expected to write their own text-books, based on their own active learning experiences themselves, and thus better feel how important such skills like reading and writing are both in and outside of school?
Building a print shop in school is yet another active, holistic way for students to more easily deepen their own reading and writing skills. Why shouldn’t those students interested in journalism be free to even write their own room newspapers, based on what they’ve actually learned about math, history, and science, interview other students about their work, and then read their reports aloud as well? Really now, why should anyone expect students to keep learning any kind of excellence if we don’t help them feel learning excellence is really an active and holistic body-mind habit-art? How many capable students never became good writers or readers simply because those skills weren’t made enjoyable or fun?
As teachers well know, even in high school student reading and writing skills are often shallow and full of mistakes, but isn't the best way to improve those weak skills with more active kinds of learning and talking experiences even in the primary grades, so they get some real feelings to base their ideas on? As many have seen, the results of merely using books to learn such skills are far from good. To us, such deeper kinds of feelings are crucially important all through life for the best kinds of knowledge, so why not make them a normal part of public school life? Without my feeling confident of my own learning skills, and that I could actually learn whatever I wanted to learn, I would have never even tried writing this book. Such feelings of confidence were tremendously more meaningful than anything I redd about confidence in books.
More Liberal Kinds of Learning?
Of course some conservatives might feel like saying young children can’t really learn habit-arts like intelligent experimentation; they’re not mentally ready. Dewey disagreed. They can begin both talking and experimenting themselves. In fact, the more parents and teachers help children experiment intelligently, by first forming a plan and then carefully testing it, the sooner they'll begin building those all-important habit-arts. And the sooner that happens, the sooner it becomes imprinted on their psyches as an impulsive instinct! So, if Dewey's right, then such feelings can start being built as the child begins talking, creating ideas, and developing its conscious level of thinking and reasoning. In fact, that kind of subconscious constructive instincts began showing evidence of itself on a behavioral level about 2.5 million years ago, as our ancestors began actively and creatively experimenting with making stone cutting and hammering tools to help break bones apart and eat their marrow. And the more such food was shared, the stronger grew their warm instincts for others in their group.
If so, then why shouldn’t even 4 year-old pre-school students begin creating conscious feelings and ideas for intelligent and kind experimental habit-arts? Even at that age the speaking ability is developed enough to start using phrases like intelligent experimentation when it comes to satisfying their bodily needs; even sense-based art projects can begin first with experimental sketches, much like adult artists normally do today. Why can’t even young students begin seeing if their actions produce the satisfying results they want produced?
With such actively intelligent work, other important results become easier. It becomes easier for subconscious feelings to be brought to a consciously verbal level of awareness, where they can be shared and experimented with more intelligently and openly, especially the constructive ones. And they can also begin feeling such actively intelligent kinds of learning can be used to improve any weaknesses whatsoever, from a habit of boredom to building interplanetary spacecraft to fixing a healthy peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread! Such instincts become easier to grow with active experimentation, see what actual results they might produce, and thus start becoming more reasonable and intelligent people, rather than remaining chained to learning what others say is important. In that way intelligent experimentation becomes a liberating habit-art, rather than a controlling and dominating one. It gives young students an excellent way for improving their harmful habits like over-eating and acting disrespectful to others. And finally, they'll begin learning the best knowledge depends completely and only on actively intelligent muscular talking and practice, helping keep learning itself organic and naturalistic, rather than merely intellectual and verbal!
Here's another example of how it might work in the primary grades. Suppose, say, a child wants to learn more about what dinosaurs. So the teacher might help the student make a plan for finding such knowledge, listing different possible sources, perhaps even how to make a model to show students, and thus begin writing his own dinosaur book. And if more than one student wants to learn more about them, they can even work in teams, with each one having some part in the project. Thus organizational skills increase. Some may want to research the facts while other may want to start gathering the model-building material.
Even if a child wants to experiment with something much less intellectual, like, say, learning to throw a baseball, then they too can be helped to first build a plan of how and where to find a baseball, throw it safely, and all perhaps with the help of an older student aide whose training to be a teacher. Even if they feel like hitting someone, they can also be shown how to do it safely, like hitting an inflated balloon person for example, and also talk about their feelings with a counselor or older student studying to be a psychologist. It might also be a good reason for the teacher to contact the child's guardians, and try to improve possibly disrespectful situations at home. After all, as Dewey saw, if such feelings are not dealt with intelligently, they will continue festering at the subconscious level, helping cause frustration, unhealthy impulses, learning difficulties, and perhaps even dangerous habits. Years ago a serial killer was finally caught and it turned out his parents had told him he was evil all his life, and punished him too. As we’ve seen, over 90% of jail inmates have been raised in negative and oppressive homes like that.
Obviously, as a general rule, the kinder and more respectful vulnerable and sensitive children are actually treated, the easier it is to start learning such actively intelligent learning habits. As many loving parents already know who have built a psychic bond with their children, they are often more than eager to begin learning such habit-arts even before they enter school, and thus begin learning some excellent character instincts.
Liberal Educational Challenges and Political Results
Again, a continuing liberal challenge is persuading conservative teachers, students, and parents such schools not only can be taught in our public schools, but should be. For example, many educators feel character-building activities are only the parents’ responsibility; teachers should merely teach students more and more book facts. Such teachers seem to forget, however, they are really public servants, paid with public tax monies and so should work for the public good. They too have a responsibility to help build a more peaceful and intelligent world too, and not just teach more book facts!
Most parents are still woefully undereducated about any other educational model besides a conservative book-centered one; it’s all they’ve known. As a result, they really don't see why our conservative schools should be improved, or how they might be improved. They’ve merely accepted an educational model handed down from medieval times, when habits of obedience to the social status quo was maintained with religious ideas of absolute Truth.
Today, however, as millions of people continue building more democratic habits of living, they’re realizing public schools should be helping build more creative and experimental character habits. We need fewer habits of passive obedience and more habits of intelligent action. By not teaching character habits useful in the real world, conservative book centered schools help increase the chances for student unemployment and crime, as objective statistics are telling us. It might seem like a cold idea to say those who run our prisons need more clients to keep taking more of the public's money, and thus don’t want better schools built. But facts are facts, and the fact is prisons are a growing industry. Some $300 Billion have been invested in building prisons since 1980, and the more that happens the less public money is available for better schools. What’s more, many in our wealthy upper class are constantly looking for more ways to keep taking the public’s money, as recent economic history teaches us. According to economist Robert Reich (Truth Dig, 10-3-12) about 30,000 people now earn about $27 million a year, while about 50% of people live in or close to poverty, and thus have less money to build better schools! If that isn't a feudalistic class structure, then what is?
Certainly some encouraging signs of change are appearing. For example, recently school lunches in Los Angeles became more healthful by reducing their calorie and sugar contents, and increasing fruit and veggie portions. But shouldn't students themselves be more involved in the better-eating process, and no doubt would be if they started studying in 1st grade their own bodies and what kinds of foods are best for it. The sooner such studies begin, the better; by high school students have already formed strong diet habits, making it easy to reject more healthful foods. They simply don't feel right and don't realize what junk foods are doing in their bodies. Another educational challenge, then, is simply this: such useful and relevant biological knowledge can begin growing even in the 1st grade, before unhealthful diet habits become strong and propulsive will power and instinct. Slowly and steadily working to build more liberal schools will better win the race to educate the next generation about living more intelligently in a democratic society! More intelligent people will create a more intelligent democracy.
Again, it should be said: more liberal and useful democratic schools are one of the best long-term antidotes to keep ending all our feudal institutions, where obedience to a few leaders is seen as a major virtue. On the contrary, democracy means government of, by, and for the people, not just the wealthy. Such liberal schools, then, are essential not only for building a more vibrant democracy, but also for preserving it! If history teaches us anything, and it does, it's that greedy conservatives will continue working to increase their power; some addictions to wealth are just as powerful as any drug addiction. To such greedy people sheer power is the end and goal in life, and not merely the means for building a better public good.
Today that power is wealth-based, and so many use it to pay politicians to pass laws giving them even more power. As Dewey showed in Democracy and Education, there’s a very important organic connection between politics and education; they are not separate and distinct systems, but rather organically related. The less young folks aren't taught how to practice democratic habits of intelligent voting and equal rights, and how to intelligently help those less well off, then the more vulnerable most people become to a political system still run largely for the benefit of wealthy folks. In such a feudalistic system it becomes easier not only to send young folks off to fight and die in unjustified wars every few years, but also keep falling for economic scams! In reality, war is a very profitable business for a few, and so many still work to create the fear of enemies so war becomes easier. And how many people eventually realized much of their private IRAs were simply going to fund managers with more and more fees, rather than themselves?
In effect, not actively educating students to feel what living in a respectful democratic society is like helps keep our greedy rich folks in power. Such people want the next generation simply trained to keep obeying their supervisors, do whatever work they're assigned, keep silent about any kind of law breaking, pay their taxes, go to sleep, and then go to work the next day all through life. For such people a medieval model of life was socially best.
The recent major economic meltdown in 2008 was a huge eye opener for millions of people. Such millions of people were losing their jobs and their public debt was increased by hundreds of billions of dollars! No doubt, many people felt their Republican political leaders were at fault, and they were, but Democrats also were to blame too! But we liberal democrats should ask ourselves, don't our conservative book-centered schools deserve some blame? Haven't they mainly trained students to obey their teachers by merely being given more and more book-facts and trivial academic ideas to learn, as well as ignoring economic subjects almost completely? Education certainly doesn't have to be that way, in fact for us Deweyan liberals shouldn't be that way. Both economics and politics should be on-going studies through public school classes.
In liberal schools creative workshops in economics and politics can help students begin learning those kinds of intelligent and useful practical skills to use in the real world, rather than studying academic subjects merely to pass the next test, even college level ones. It would be a better and more intelligent way to help lower our crime rates, unemployment, delinquency, health and financial problems, and also lessen upper class power to keep dominating and enslaving our politicians and citizens just as happened in the Middle Ages? Such schools may even help create a Magna Charta 2 event, where the people begin controlling more of their own wealth for their own public good, rather than the good of greedy Wall Street bankers and hedge fund operators. To us Deweyan liberals, our own neighborhood schools are another very important social key to creating such an event, or series of events around the nation. Again, public non-profit banks are another way of creating such a nation, so why shouldn’t students begin learning how they can work while going to public school?
In short, to make our nation more democratic and people-oriented, there's no need to travel thousands of miles to another protest; such improvement can begin in our own neighborhoods, here and now. Learning intelligent practical economic skills, and how to choose progressive political candidates, are much more important skills than knowing European literature, how to prove geometric theorems, who the presidents were, and how to find Beijing on a map. Is such knowledge really the best test of human excellence and intelligence? Or, is knowing where to find the answers to such questions what intelligence is? Whether you become the CEO of a huge corporation, or the democratic CEO of your own family, knowing how to act intelligently for the public good is a much more valuable social habit-art in a growing democracy. It’s democracy’s best growing food.
Many of our corporate workers including myself who merely accepted the economic status quo in the 1970s, 80s and 90s didn’t demand more democratic decision-making power on corporate or school boards. As a result, eventually millions became economic victims when their jobs were shipped overseas, they couldn't pay their mortgages, and teaching jobs were lost because of shrinking tax revenues!
So, the question is: Why keep students passive and unaware about what's going on right here and now in their own bodies and their neighborhoods? In that kind of immature and narrow psychic world violent and destructive war will continue being a welcome relief to many who don't yet know how to control their own stressful bodily tensions with intelligent exercise and diet. What's more, in the real world things do not stay as they are, but many wealthy folks simply have more tools to keep taking more of the public’s money, whether it’s for private schools, private prisons, or private retirement accounts. In conservative schools people learn how to passively trust others to take care of them, and so more active kinds of experimental learning are needed to teach more intelligent democratic habits.
Ultimately, if unchecked the wealthy have it best; they can comfortably sit around and wait for the next economic money-making bubble to grow as people scramble for what jobs they can find. As we've seen, in the 1920s it was the Stock Market bubble, in the 1940s, 60s, and 2000s it was war, and just recently housing became another profitable bubble to wealthy bankers. And so the more our schools continue keeping students disconnected from the economic and political realities going on here and now, the more dangerous they allow life to remain. Obviously not all students will be interested in such knowledge, just as many adults aren't interested in such knowledge. But, adults can now more easily than ever before get such information, so why not also empower students to learn about such information tools? How many students are kept from building feelings even about recent history? How many know German Nazi leaders told their people they were really a master race and so had a right to ignore minority deportations, or that communist leaders told their people their economic system was really the inevitable result of natural forces? How many students today know China is experimenting with an economic system some call state capitalism, where the government puts people in control of corporations, make it easier to control dangerous and destabilizing money-making schemes, and thus easier to keep increasing the public good? How many students today know Venezuela’s socialist economy is using some of its oil wealth to help many of the poor? How many know China continues buying more and more US buildings, businesses, and assets? If our schools are going to continue teaching academic facts to students, why not teach more current economic and political facts, rather than just useless and irrelevant historical and literary facts to most everyone? That kind of an undemocratic educational model helps perpetuate social instability, rather than stability and equal opportunity.
Without such knowledge about practical current events, and how powerful democratic actions are for challenging greedy actions, it becomes much more difficult for low paid workers to get higher wages and organize a union, as we're seeing today with fast-food workers at highly profitable corporations. It’s not inevitable we’ll see the birth of a more democratic economic sector, but the more organized workers become, the easier it’ll be for workers to demand equal voting power on their corporation’s board of directors. The more schools, homes, and churches teach such democratic skills, the sooner that day will dawn.
After World War 2 more and more people moved into a larger middle class with the help of union contracts, but since the 1970s people and students have become more passive about union power, and thus more enslaved to a system in which the rich kept getting richer and controlling more of the economy. No doubt, some unions were given pension deals proving impossible to fulfill, as Detroit’s recent bankruptcy shows us, but those kinds of events show us the need for more intelligent kinds of union actions. Would Detroit voters have okayed such contracts had they listened to a debate about their results, and then vote on them? The problem with Detroit and so many other cities is not that democracy can’t work, but that it needs to include more people than just union and political leaders! Presidential candidate Al Smith said it like this: The best cure for our democracy is more democracy!
Only small feudalistic and undemocratic boards of directors really control most corporations and school systems, and thus control the lives of most everyone in them. Is it any wonder our society remains so feudalistic? True, worker input was often encouraged on, say, the auto assembly line, but the more workers were kept out of the decision-making process at the board of directors level, the easier it was for jobs to be shipped overseas, and be kept from sharing in company profits. Today, auto workers are making about half of what they made a few decades ago, while corporate profits and CEO pay have increased tremendously. Even when corporations did go bankrupt, CEOs often walked away with millions while workers walked to the unemployment line. The lesson from all these economic and political facts should be obvious: the more workers demand a greater share of power on their corporate boards of directors, and the more students, teachers, and parents demand more educational power to build active and intelligently experimental schools, the stronger our democracy will become.
In the early 1900s, Dewey of course saw an even more brutal economic system in Chicago and New York, supported by equally conservative schools. Safety laws and unions were almost non-existent. At the time a flood of new immigrants worked for pennies an hour in unhealthful and unsafe factories, and lived in filthy slums while students sat at their desks year after year, reading patriotic stories about some kind of American dream. So, wanting to help students become better educated democrats, he suggested ways our schools could actually train students to live more intelligently in a democratic society, so they could better keep improving their own lives intelligently and safely. He built a more active and constructive educational model of excellence based on students learning more about improving their own neighborhoods, and also how to use intelligent experimentation to help people better fight for their constitutional rights and freedoms. During the 1930s there were thousands of strikes around the nation as workers demanded better wages and working conditions, but again, war in the 1940s diverted attention and money away from such goals, and the Taft-Hartley law passed by conservatives in the late 1940s also greatly weakened union power.
So, again, it's the peoples' responsibility to begin working intelligently, one small step at a time in their own neighborhoods, and building more liberal schools one grade at a time. The more students see how greedy people make everyone’s life more dangerous, the easier it’ll be to ask who on earth needs $27 million a year to live? Just imagine how many better schools could be built with just half those earnings! Shouldn't more students begin learning they have the power to stop basing our economy on greed, exploitation, and war-making, as happened during the brutal and vicious Vietnam war, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Such peaceful democratic feelings can begin growing in more liberal schools. If we’re to keep building a stronger democracy, then more students should begin learning how to focus their progressive and democratic energies to increase economic power and personal freedom for everyone? In such schools students will learn how to intelligently use their subject-choosing and voting power. After all, today the US regularly does business with Vietnam, Communist China, and Russia, even though they were sworn enemies at one time and our government kept using the public’s money to build more and more useless and expensive atomic weapons! Thus the educational challenge remains: learning what such liberal schools might look like.
12. INTELLIGENT WORK AND SOCIAL RESULTS
Socrates: Know Yourself
Thousands of years ago ancient Greeks created 2 secular ideas as the foundation of all intelligent education. One was Nothing In Excess, and the other was Know Yourself. Centuries before Socrates lived both ideas were elevated to sacred knowledge and inscribed in stone at Apollo's Delphic shrine.
The practical wisdom in those 2 ideas remains as useful today as they were in ancient Greece; the tragedy of the Greeks, however, was to not teach what those 2 ideas feels like to all their young folks. At Sparta conservative leaders built a most excessive military society, while in many other city-states schools to actually teach such ideas to the next generation never were allowed to grow. For the most part education was confined to private tutors for the wealthy, and on-the-job training for most everyone else. Eventually a Greek civil war caused in part by excessively fearful feelings all but destroyed its truly amazing culture, where experimental science and the arts were beginning to grow, as well as democratic equal rights for all people.
In spite of their short history as guiding educational principles, knowing one's self can still help build and guide intelligent kinds of work in our schools. After all, everyone has a body-mind, so learning simple basic intelligent habits about human biology and psychology remain two of the most relevant and useful subjects for primary and secondary students. The more students intelligently learn about themselves, how their own body-minds work best when they practice such personal excellence, the more difficult it becomes to even think about unintelligent and disrespectful actions like harming innocent people, abusing one's body with harmful food and drugs, and even denying equal rights to others. In short, learning to respect their own bodies makes it easier for students to respect everyone else's! As we'll see, such studies can become on-going throughout their school years.
Such intelligent kinds of knowledge and respect can begin growing on both a biological and psychological level even in primary schools. For example, the more students learn how their different systems actually work, the results of eating unhealthful foods, and how to build intelligent and excellent habit-arts, then the less need they'll be for health professionals to treat some 50% of our diet-related illnesses. The more students are distracted and prevented from learning more about their own body-minds with useless academic facts, the more difficult it'll be for students to learn even simple basic hygiene habits. For example, oral bacteria skyrocket within about 20 minutes after eating, and so students will learn how to prevent them from attacking their teeth and gums, thus helping prevent needless cavities and gum disease! No doubt, dentists are grateful for not teaching children how to intelligently clean their mouths after a meal, but students will no doubt benefit from not needing dental care as well as parents who pay for such services.
About 12 years after Dewey wrote the last quote at the beginning of this book, the founder of Behavioral psychology himself, John Watson, wrote in his book The Ways of Behaviorism about educating students in public schools to become more intelligent about themselves.
"Is it too unattainable a social ideal to believe that every (one) should be trained about (their) own (body) ... nervous system, heart, lungs, kidneys, glands, sex apparatus? ... Shouldn’t we do this early and so thoroughly that no old wives’ tales can ever again find a lodging place? Isn’t it more important for them to get this (knowledge) early than to get their literature, geography, history, chemistry, and physics, important as these subjects are?
Next, ...'mental hygiene'... (S)how them ... how infantile ... behavior arises and how it is carried over into adult life; teach them about fear, love, and anger reactions; work out with them how the individual behaves in depressions. Teach them what exhibition behavior is like; how easily seclusion behavior develops, and invalidism and other (early) psychoses. Teach them first how to spot these reaction patterns in others, and then, most important of all, how to spot them in themselves by watching ... their own behavior. What boy or girl ... could not check (their) own behavior three or four times a month? ‘For days I have fought with my parents--two or three times in the last week ... I have been depressed and have tried to find excuses for not going to school and doing my other work.’ Or, to change the picture: ‘I have been getting entirely too boisterous and loud, too excited; driving the automobile too fast; taking too many risks and dangers in swimming and diving.’ Or again, ‘I find myself avoiding people more than I used to--I like to get in a corner and read. I don’t go out on the streets very much.’ Or once more, ‘I find that I'm going with girls very much less than I used to and that I have begun to gang up with boys in the neighborhood.’
Having taught individuals to observe their own (actions) in this way, as they observe the (actions) of others, can’t we next teach them what to do when their records show that they are getting into jams? In other words, give them the essentials and rudiments of corrective hygiene? For example: ‘All my work has slowed down. I am lacking pep, don’t care whether I go to see anybody or not; I have been leading a humdrum existence; things haven’t gone right at home. I guess I’ll talk to a physician. He will probably tell me I had better pack up and go for a week’s fishing or hunting and that when I come back I’d better change things around a bit--try to do more interesting jobs, get some hobbies going that I have been flirting with for a long time, and to reach some satisfactory decision about my sex life which has been bothering me lately.’
I would give this training before the fourteenth year, since at this age the great mass of our population gives up its schooling. Can young children get all this? I am hopeful of it. My business experience has opened my eyes to how simply things can be put to the public--how in homely words nearly all the worthwhile truths of science can be set forth.
Unless the child has a word organization (to describe) every situation ... how can the larynx (one’s speaking organ) ever become dominant? Today we are predominantly a verbally reacting animal--this means that the (speaking ability) is the repository of most of our social and ethical training. Now, if (something) does not activate this ..., (then) ‘shalls,’ and ‘shall nots’ can never arouse (more) socially acceptable reactions. It seems to me that almost the whole of ethics hinges upon the extent to which the child can be verbally organized. ... In other words ... the (speaking ability) will become regulatory of all behavior. It will then dominate (one’s habit-arts, the source of one’s ability to experience any kind of well-being and happiness). (112-115, additions are my own)
Dewey was one of America’s liberal education leaders for much of his life, and I'm sure he would agree with such ideas even for primary school students. In fact, for about a hundred years now professional educators have known about such ideas, so why haven't more people been educated to build such habits, and thus live more satisfying adult lives? Why keep hyping the conservative myth of knowing academic facts and logical trivia by saying standardized test scores are really the best way to judge educational excellence? As we've been seeing, a more conservative educational model is basically to blame. As a result, simply not enough parents, teachers, and students know about such liberal educational possibilities, or how to begin experimenting with them one grade at a time. Thus, parental education becomes another major challenge for us Dewey liberals. If more people demanded such intelligent learning and active experimentation in their own neighborhood schools, the sooner it would begin. Until students have the right to know more about their own bodies, how they best work while studying what they choose; if not, our schools and society will remain basically feudalistic in nature.
As we've been seeing, certainly some surface or cosmetic conservative reforms are going forward, like the so-called Charter school movement, but we'll see in a later section that movement certainly doesn't go to the heart of liberal criticism. In what sense are such schools improvements for students when they're still required to learn the same kinds of academic trivia they're learning in public schools? More and more, such schools are turning out to benefit conservatives more than anyone else; they help break up teacher unions and in many cases create profits for investors. To us Deweyan liberals that is not intelligent reform, that is a continuing form of conservative educational slavery! Many educational laws and initiatives keep restricting real liberal reform and student choice, and thus keep parents, teachers, and students feeling they really can't make any progressive changes in their own schools. Such fine-sounding laws like No Child Left Behind in effect dictate to teachers what must be taught in both public and charter schools, and how much it’s taught; often teachers are even limited in their choice of books too. Of course 'home schooling' remains another educational option, but how is that a real option for poorer families where even both parents must work to make ends meet?
How Relaxed Are You?
So, what other kinds of intelligent habits would students learn in biology or psychology workshops, and how can they be best taught to build such important habit-arts? More will be said about such workshops in sections 36 and 37, but a few ideas can be mentioned here.
For example, there's the important biological habit of learning to work intelligently, gracefully, and joyfully itself; it's an intelligent habit-art useful throughout life. Where is it written work must be boring, dull, and uncreative? In school workshops where intelligent experimentation is a normal part of every learning process, it becomes easier to also teach such excellent habits like creative thinking. Without learning such habits, even the easiest work can quickly become tiresome, boring, and stressful, even grocery shopping itself. How often do people soon begin feeling tired and fatigued after even the smallest amount of work or exercise simply because they've never built an intelligent habit of working with a minimum of useless tension and stress? In other words, while building such intelligent work habits in the early grades means learning to use only the muscles needed for a project, and that art helps make all work more enjoyable, productive, creative, and even energizing. A little personal anecdote may better explain what I mean.
Recently, at the tender age of 60, I began feeling how easy it was to let go of some useful tension I normally carried around. As I was jogging I began feeling what's it's like to relax some tense neck and shoulder muscles; anatomists call one the trapezius muscle. It's a huge muscle connecting the shoulders to the skull. Eventually, when I realized how strong it's tension was, I even had some fun and declared war on it! The more I learned to feel when it was needlessly tense, and then to quickly relax it, the more normal activities like walking, jogging, and even exercising became much more enjoyable, refreshing, and less tiresome. And the more I practiced relaxing my trapezius, the less stress and muscular tension I felt; as a result, it's easier to feel more refreshed and energized in whatever I do, rather than tiresome. Even though I had been carrying around such useless tension for decades, the more I practiced the easier it became to relax and enjoy life, even events like typing on this book or playing golf. In other words, it feels like I’m building a more graceful habit-art one step at a time, and enjoying it as well. When I feel that muscular tension, it’s getting easier to just relax and let it go. It's even become easier to fall asleep too.
In liberal schools where knowing our self becomes more important, young students might find it even easier to learn such an intelligent and relaxed work habit, if, of course, they're encouraged to learn more about their own muscles and feel how they can learn to relax those they don't need. After all, any job can be worked at tensely or more intelligently. In fact, young students will probably find learning that kind of intelligent biological habit even easier. Their bodily habits are still growing, and so they’re normally much more relaxed than adults. In general, children are looser and much more flexible than adults, and so it's easier for them to feel what being tense and relaxed is like. Liberal schools with biological and psychological workshops, as well as homes and churches, will thus encourage students to use only the muscles they need for sawing, sewing, welding, auto repair, or computer work. Such relaxing techniques are already a big part of Hindu and Buddhist monasteries with yoga exercises, helping build a more graceful habit-art of movement. The scientific name for that study is kinesiology--the study of movement. You can see one result in their peaceful and serene sculpture art of sitting buddhas.
When I was teaching and walking around the classroom I used to notice how some students would often tense and twist themselves up just to write a daily assignment. It was sometimes even painful to see them use many more muscles than they needed. A comparable piece of Western sculpture is Auguste Rodin's The Thinker. It shows a man all twisted up and tensed while thinking about some problem. It certainly needed be that way, but in conservative book-centered schools it's easy for students to keep from building an intelligent writing or reading habit, and use only the muscles they need. They learned to write before they learned to relax, and so they continue writing with tensed arm, shoulder, neck, and back muscles. In reality, however, all they need to write are a few hand and arm muscles.
A result of such unintelligent training also affects the very important habit of mental concentration. Many overly tense students find it difficult to stay focused on their assignments, even for short times; soon it just becomes too painful and fatiguing to keep working, so they quit and rest. Some gripped the pencil like it was a life raft and they were in the ocean. How many of your teachers ever encouraged you to just relax and work gracefully? Only one of mine ever mentioned it, and only once. However, such an intelligent working habit-art can be liberating for all other kinds of learning! It helps lessen the need for relaxing drugs, and also helps increase the amount of work done. So, without playfully learning to work intelligently, and to enjoy what relaxed work feels like, then any kind of work itself soon becomes stressful and sometimes even painful. And the more that happens, the more difficult it becomes to ask creative and thoughtful questions about one's work, whatever it may be; it becomes more difficult to think intelligently!
In liberal schools such intelligent bodily habits are much more important than learning any kind of academic fact and skill. What good is learning to type, for example, when students are so physically tense they can only type or concentrate on anything for only a short while? Even if students want to become lawyers or doctors, such a relaxed work habit is useful, and what's more, students can begin learning such a habit in any kind of active workshop, even, say, a clothing shop. Young doctors and lawyers can be encouraged to relax while making their own clothes with the help of teachers so trained. Then, when they go out into the community to practice their blood pressure reading and reflex testing, they'll also know what it feels like to be properly dressed. Why shouldn't future doctors and nurses still in high school be allowed to take elderly urine samples, analyze them, and then discuss the results with patients? Such a relaxed work habit would also help them better study all those law and medical books. Even students building more intelligent exercise habits can also learn to use only the muscles they need, rather than all the muscles they've got. Even if some students never get to law or med school, they'll still have some useful knowledge about how their bodies should be working, helping also to better respect the foods they're eating. Thus, intelligence is a habit-art useful in whatever career students choose! Even those who want to learn practical landscaping will find intelligent work habits as useful as anyone else!
Such active, intelligent, and experimental biological and psychological workshops help make liberal schools much more of a learning adventure, rather than a confined and restricted boredom. Do you remember how some of your teachers would stand daily before the class, wanting so much to be the absolute focus of attention and knowledge? There they would faithfully clutch their answer keys for playing a game—I’ve got the ‘right’ answer, you guess what is it! It might be called Game Show education. And they would keep asking the question until someone guessed the ‘right’ answer. Meanwhile, those beautiful children who were too busy learning other things to learn the ‘right’ trivia answer could be easily ridiculed by other students and made to feel like dopes. And when that situation is coupled to the often irrelevant subject matter being taught, then it only makes school that much more of a negative and artificial experience. After all, how often do students talk about history, science, or even mathematics outside of school? But how often is an intelligent work habit-art useful in the real world, I mean besides always! Again, in liberal schools the entire focus shifts from teachers and books to students and their needs. In them students learn how such book-knowledge should be used to help improve their habits as well as others in the real world. Wouldn't such an intelligent habit-art help make schools much more of a character-building experience, not to mention help build a more humane and satisfying society? If so, then why not allow some school work to focus on intelligent kinds of community-based service work?
Such projects needn't be overly complex and difficult, especially for primary age students. They can be as simple as building or painting a fence, repairing something in their own school, growing some flowers for retirement homes, or for older students perhaps working on the more complex project of building a community garden or fish hatchery, to help feed the neighborhood poor. Aren't those the kinds of intelligent work projects building a fine sense of community and democratic character, as well as energetic habits of initiative and intelligence? And wouldn't they be much more educational than all reading assignments ABOUT character and community combined? Unless they're practiced and felt on an emotional and muscular level, any idea soon fads.
How many students in conservative schools are rewarded with good grades mainly for obeying teacher assignments and imitating teacher solutions, instead of learning to think creatively about how to use their knowledge for helping others? In some urban districts about 50% are leaving school before they graduate, but who is there to teach them what it feels like to work intelligently once they’re on their own? As we saw in the quote above, John Watson, one of Behavioral psychology's founders, and of course Functional Behaviorist John Dewey agreed: from kindergarten through high school schools should have many kinds of active learning workshops, helping teach what it feels like to work in an intelligent, relaxed, creative, and cheerful way. And why should universities be any different, even for undergraduates? Wouldn’t such active and community-based schools be one of the greatest gifts we could give our children and our nation, where the next generation would build more caring character habits, nurture more constructive interests and involvements in their communities, and where people from diverse and different backgrounds could more easily work together cooperatively with those focused on the same goals? How else are we to live peacefully and creatively in a democratic society, and keep it growing, unless we start building such schools where children to work intelligently, and respect others' constructive work as well?
What Are Taxes Paying For?
Here’s an addition problem perhaps more relevant than what children normally get in math class. Take the almost two million convicts wasting their time and public money in our prisons, each at a cost to taxpayers of about $30,000 a year! (Is that one reason prison guard unions are so powerful?) Next, add to that all the public tax money spent on dropouts, homeless, and the unemployed. Next, add to that all those who work with social welfare, police, and court programs to care and supervise all those people who never learned how to feel excellent character habit-arts, and who regularly break the law to make their money. Then, if your calculator hasn't exploded yet, add to that figure all the costs of wasted time, money, and energy spent in conservative book-work centered schools! No doubt, every concerned and caring citizen would probably be outraged to see how much of their tax money is being spent on needless costs when our schools could be helping improve all such unintelligent habits. Imagine the kinds of schools we could build with even half of that wasted money!
We Deweyan Humanists say such tax waste all starts when our homes, churches, and schools don’t require constructive, intelligent community WORK, or even vocational work. Even California ex-Governor Schwarzenegger went to such schools in Austria! Just imagine how much more we could develop children’s useful talents and keep improving our neighborhoods if such monies were freed for better educational purposes. In our current deep recession (2008-2012) such training is rapidly becoming much more difficult to finance; even teachers' unions, like the California Teachers Association and other similar groups, are lobbying against such community service work classes (Long Beach Press Telegram, Section A9, on 8-19-09). It's natural; many teachers are being laid off for want of tax money, and such programs divert that money.
A recent editorial in the same conservative newspaper echoed similar ideas. It cited a report entitled The California Dropout Research Project from UC Santa Barbara; it estimated over a lifetime dropouts from L.A. schools cost the city over $2 billion in lost revenue, meaning the city would need to tax people more just to keep the city running! For those not used to feeling those kinds of numbers, that's 2,000 MILLION dollars! Dropouts "have higher jobless rates, lower incomes, poorer health, higher rates of criminal behavior, and an increased dependence on public assistance." So it's not just we liberal Deweyan progressives who see the weak and unhealthful social results of a conservative educational model. Reform minded parents and students shouldn't be discouraged, however. The good news is one local school district actually lowered their dropout rate with "vocational options". (Press Telegram, Section A, The Cost of Dropping Out)
Dewey's liberal kinds of schools are places where such intelligent work habits keep growing stronger for all students, even those who like to learn more academic facts! And they become even more important when over 90% of students who go to college don't graduate! Thus, the more students are trained to enjoy working intelligently at what they feel is interesting, the healthier and less wasteful our economy will be, not to mention lower levels of personal stress and frustration! Even if clothing shop students don't go into the business, they'll still know what intelligent and creative work feels like. With such poor results for our conservative schools aren't such progressive ideas at least worth experimenting with, slowly and carefully of course? If even primary students were allowed more freedom to start building useful work skills, they would make an emotional commitment to their school, and thus decrease their desire to drop out or act disruptively in class. And what's more, there's some sound psychology in back of such schools: like Dewey said, we know best what we build! What’s wrong with telling students they’re in school to start building intelligent habits they can use all through life?
A Little More History
In ancient Greece we've seen how Plato artificially tried separating knowledge from a sense-based experimental learning method. For him contemplative reasoning was the best learning method. In doing so, however, not only did he paint a harmful and disruptive dualistic picture of nature and human nature, but of educational excellence as well. So, when schools today continue making all students merely learn and reason with ideas, whether religious or secular, then they too basically practice a socially harmful Platonic model of learning; their social results often produce narrow, weak, and often unhealthful habits; for Plato health itself should be ignored. And also, such a book-based learning method gives students a feeling all knowledge is already known, so why keep experimenting to learn more?
Again, don't misunderstand. We Deweyan liberals are saying there definitely IS a place for subjects like geometry, algebra, trigonometry, poetry, history, and geography, but why separate them completely from being used to help build a better world, like both Plato and Aristotle did? When used intelligently such knowledge should have a social use, not merely a recreational use, as they both saw natural knowledge itself. Without learning how facts can be used intelligently in the real world, conservative schools help build a feeling for knowledge as merely an end-in-itself, rather than as a means to building a better and more equal democratic world. In fact, as the Republican candidate for president in 2012 showed us, many conservatives today don't see much use in helping others live a more productive and enjoyable life. In fact, wealth and power often make it more difficult to help those who need help.
By today’s standards Jesus' society too had many frustrated and fearful people. Many were so poor and oppressed they began believing a new religious idea: god would soon create a new earthly kingdom where Jews would rule over other nations. No doubt, to help release their daily stresses and tensions, labor and work played an important role. Normally one-third of the day was given joyously to labor and work. It’s easy to picture Jesus as a boy helping Joseph in his carpenter shop improve the lives of his fellow Jews at Nazareth, Sephoris, and all the little Roman towns around the Sea of Galilee mentioned in the New Testament. His carpentry work taught him at an early age not only practical skills, but also how to help other Jews with his knowledge. Eventually he began using ideas about a Kingdom of Heaven in the same way; it gave hope to otherwise hopeless Jews, thus helping reduce tensed and stressful lives. At the time hunger, disease, and pain were common. The point is, he gave such knowledge and work a social use. Even a little earlier, in those same fearful days, the great liberal Jewish scholar Hillel himself worked regularly as a common laborer, learning about physical work's feelings, knowledge, and its useful social results. It's another example of a basic Behavioral fact: the more people learn to work intelligently, the better their body-minds work.
Enjoyable or Dreadful Work
Again, actively learning to enjoy work and make it as intelligent as possible is another important goal of liberal education. In an unscientific world much of ancient and medieval life produced fears of nature itself, and in schools punishment was often given for not learning what the teacher wanted learned. Clearly then, a great challenge still facing all of us liberals today is consciously making all student work playfully enjoy-ABLE; it helps make learning a refreshing activity, rather than a dull and boring chore. No doubt sometimes learning is difficult; often we need to build a new learning method, but the good news about enjoyable and creative work is its therapeutic results; often intelligent work can be a very useful kind of therapy. It may be another one of Hollywood's mottos as well.
In fact nature has sculpted us too to be active creatures; otherwise we wouldn't all have as many muscles as we do. But we also have the biggest brains for our size, so the educational challenge is to build a habit of working intelligently and creatively. Unlike some animals, such work is not an instinctive habit-art. So, for our work to FEEL relaxed and enjoyable takes some practice, encouragement, and some rewarding from teachers, parents, and even students. In Behavioral psychology workshops, for example, students learn how to intelligently reward themselves for work well done, and thus begin building an instinctive habit-art forming one’s will-power; the more it's practiced, the stronger it becomes. So, the obvious question becomes: is there a better time to start building such intelligent work habits other than early in childhood, before bad working habits are built and thus perverting one’s character? As many adult smokers and overeaters know, improving those harmful habits can take years.
For many people who haven’t learned how to intelligently relax and enjoy their work, their freedom itself remains much less than what it could be. For many, working stressfully, tensely, and without grace or creativity can quickly make life itself feel odd and out of sorts, so to speak. For all the US's superpower military status and high powered technology, the simple habit-art of making our work playfully enjoyable and respectful of our laws seems for many like a lost art. And it is simply because too many of our public schools, homes, and churches ignore teaching it. Our government has recently been exposed as having a huge spying network in place, even on ordinary citizens who pose absolutely no terrorist threat to anyone, and yet many in that system continue taking taxpayer money and ignoring their duty to work within the Constitution and protect peoples' privacy! Freud felt such impulsive and unthinking actions so deeply in his patients it helped grow his very pessimistic feelings about civilization itself; one pessimistic book was Civilization and Its Discontents. Whenever someone at work starts rubbing their neck and shoulders trying to relieve their discomfort, it’s yet another sign they too are carrying too much unnecessary tension, and they haven't learned to relax those muscles yet. As a result, work itself often becomes a continuing tension-filled event, rather than an enjoyable and refreshing one. Certainly our schools could be doing more to help students feel what enjoyable work is like, and how to build that intelligent habit-art.
More Educational Role-Playing
We've already begun seeing how important enjoyable role playing is as an educational tool; it adds an emotional and feeling depth to mere ideas, helping make them richer and more meaningful, not to mention making school a much more creative and natural place for learning. When practiced intelligently role-playing also helps teachers learn more about their students, and thus become better able to guide their growth to feel what more intelligent habits are like. How many times have you tried talking with people who talk too softly or loudly? So, such role playing not only helps keep students learning more about themselves and their world, but also becoming more confident as well. As a result, such intelligent habits help make students less vulnerable to drug and food abuse, boredom, anxiety, dependence, and even destructiveness as an outlet for their stressful tensions. For Dewey there were basically just 2 ways to relieve muscular stress and tension: playfully or destructively! So, the more students actively feel what enjoyably creative play feels like, the more intelligent they become. No doubt, some feel schools shouldn't be a place where such habits are taught, but when a student’s home or church doesn’t encourage such habit-arts, then why shouldn’t schools be places where intelligently enjoy-ABLE actions are consciously practiced? Wouldn’t everyone be better off with less stressed out and tense people? And, aren't intelligently playful exercise habit-arts another good way to relive such tensions? Have you even seen a tense marathon runner?
Such intelligent role playing has a creative part to it. If children are filmed and recorded talking to each other, and then played back to them, it becomes easier with the teacher's help for them to feel how more creative they could be, and how much fun they can have while actively practicing the art.
Now and again during our brief glances at history we’ve seen creative imagination at work, in the religious, philosophic, and scientific traditions. Plato was a very creative person within the confines of his own conservative dualistic assumptions; most of his role-models were some very intelligent and practical Pythagoreans. What philosopher up till then had talked about taking some time and effort to reproduce intelligently, so children would have more options in life? And of course for Dewey imaginative creativity is the one habit-art lifting any work above the level of mere automatic routine and sameness. The good news is children are often natural creators and experimenters, as parents soon discover. Children like to keep varying their games to make them more unpredictable and challenging, rather than merely routine. So, shouldn't our schools be bringing such subconscious creative instincts to a more conscious level of awareness, so they can be more actively strengthened and deepened?
Only recently have inventive people like Thomas Edison been able to use more reliable scientific facts to keep improving life, so why shouldn’t our schools, homes, and churches be places where young folks are encouraged to practice creative role playing? What kind of paint should be used on a project, and how much will be needed? The more they role play with such a creative talking habit-art, the better they get at looking forward to possibly results. At one time Edison imagined how light might be generated if an electric current were passed through the right kind of filament inside a glass bulb. And so with some creatively intelligent trial and error experimentation he and his workers began playing with and testing different ideas and materials, day after day for over a year. For Dewey science is the art of actively testing ideas. Slowly, with such trial and error experimentation, they began seeing some encouraging results, achieving partial success, and then working to improve those results, until some 70 experiments later a filament of carbonized cotton was verified to burn the longest.
No doubt, all children don’t have that kind of creative inventiveness, but they can think imaginatively and so keep strengthening their creative habit-art with active role playing. Edison’s mother was his teacher, not the public schools, and she no doubt encouraged him to keep asking intelligent questions like how can something be improved, and then start testing different ideas. Even as a teenager he improved the telegraph system. So why shouldn't all students start actively role playing with such habits? Why shouldn't students in a science lab actively role play what was going on in Edison's lab? Wouldn't that be a much more meaningful habit-art to learn than merely reading a few paragraphs about Edison in some American History book? In fact, all such creativity can start with a simple question: What would happen if ...?
Obviously not everyone had the benefit of such an intelligent mother, but can't most all students learn more about creative thinking and invention with role playing skits, no matter what the subject is? Don’t we continue keeping children immature when they’re not allowed to keep playfully role-playing with such real events, and feel how their own actions can keep strengthening their imaginative habit-art?
What’s more, such imaginative thinking can be used to deepen the feeling for any subject. What kinds of creativity were going on in different parts of the world, like ancient Greece, Rome, Jerusalem, Moscow, or Beijing? The more students role play with such ideas, the more their feelings and ideas for history and culture grow. Otherwise, students will continue learning the same narrow and shallow kinds of facts in conservative schools while unhealthful habits continue growing. Currently one such habit is over-eating. Rather than role play about all the many kinds of unhealthful diseases such a habit can produce, the whole subject of intelligent eating is largely ignored. And the more that happens, the more vulnerable students become to many diseases, using more tax money for medical care. If such practical reasoning and such liberal schools are beyond possible, then Freud might have been right after all.
Again, aren't we really just cheating not only ourselves but our children and our nation if we permit any subject to ignore creative role playing from becoming a more powerful teaching tool? Such role-playing uses not only student brains, but their senses and muscles too, and so makes learning a much more naturalistic and holistic event. It thus deepens knowledge itself. Wouldn’t not having such enjoyable learning activities in all their classes be one reason why so many students are dropping out of our conservative schools?
What else prevents such schools from evolving but the current absurd conservative emphasis on standardized test grades? No doubt, many future teachers are gorged, so to speak, with such facts while majoring in English, science, math, and history, and want to make students feel how important those subjects are. But what’s the best way to accomplish that goal, merely by reading books or by role playing with a subject’s ideas? After all, even medieval schools had a role playing aspect to them, called church rituals. The tragedy, however, was to keep their ideas so abstract and otherworldly people actually learned the names of angles and the different levels of hell. What’s more, such ideas were labeled absolute Truth, thus confining and restricting more creative thinking about life and nature in this world. If so, then why shouldn’t students be encouraged to role play more often about, say, the ancient Athenian Solon, and the many problems he helped creatively solve? Wouldn't such active learning do more to teach students about debts and slavery than any text-book story, and also how socially dangerous it can be to allow wealth to stay concentrated and unregulated? Such role-play projects help make learning a much more enjoyable and creative adventure, rather than merely another reading assignment.
No doubt, some conservatives may say such a teaching tool won't produce the best testing results; we Deweyan liberals disagree. Since when is merely passing a test the best gage of learning excellence? How many law school tests were passed by even many presidents who then later made a mockery of respect for the law? And, aren’t debt and slavery still as important today as they were in Solon’s day? Isn’t the intelligent questioning of basic religious, scientific, and political assumptions just as important today as they've always been?
These days, for example, many college students merely assume they must go into debt for tens of thousands of dollars while school presidents are sometimes given $300,000 a year, a home, and also thousands of dollars for gasoline! Many obedient and uncreative students merely shrug and feel that's the way the system is. The less they question such assumptions, however, and don’t begin intelligently experimenting to produce better results, then the easier it becomes to keep increasing their debts, make the wealthy even wealthier, and thus lessen their own freedom and liberty!
Liberal role-playing schools, homes, and churches on the other hand, not only teach students not to accept such feudalistic assumptions and their results, but to keep experimenting intelligently to make life more democratic, fair, and stable for all. Is it any wonder even modern conservatives like Ike Eisenhower attacked such an educational model? To people like him such democratic and creative schools were a prescription for social disaster; their students would continue challenging the entire conservative status quo: those who own the country ought to run the country! Many on Wall Street want to keep seeing students go into debt; it gives more money to the bankers who finance their loans. However, how can our society continue becoming more democratically stable and keep growing the public good when parents and students don’t feel they can make their schools much more student friendly? With such an active learning model students can more easily feel how intelligent experimentation may be used for overcoming any kind of challenge and obstacle.
Modern Challenges: Organic or Divided?
Restricting learning to mere book-ideas in fact helps kill the entire habit-art of using knowledge creativity for social purposes. On the other hand, using knowledge actively, and give ideas more depth and meaning, makes learning a more meaningful event, as well as helping build more excellent character habits. Such habits thus helps build a democracy where the public good becomes more important than the personal wealth of a small upper class. Why shouldn't high school chemistry students, for example, be free to use their knowledge to help beautify, detoxify, and increase the oxygen content in, say, classrooms, parks, and retirement homes, and thus increase the public good; some 50 plants help remove harmful chemicals from the air.
In fact, anthropology teaches us such kind and sharing community-based habits helped build human character habits into our ape-like ancestors over 2 million years ago! Both stone tool making and burial arts much later almost certainly were used to make life more satisfying and less fearful to those ancestors. Such character development has continued being practiced in the primitive, ancient, and medieval worlds, and so it deserves to be practiced on a large scale in our public schools too. It too is another major challenge to we liberal parents, teachers, and students.
Such conservative schools seem to getting even more abstract and idea-based than ever before. The so-called Common Core Educational Standards have recently been made even more abstract, thus producing even lower test scores than before. Such corporate sponsored and federally encouraged standards in effect take away more meaningful and organic kinds of role playing models from parents, students, and teachers, in effect forcing all students to learn academic ideas they neither want nor need to know! Recent test results in New York City and state, for example, are very disturbing (New York Times, 8-7-13). Only "26% of students in third through eighth grade passed ... in English, and 30% passed in math ... " Imagine how students must feel about school and learning itself when about 70% of students learned they failed the test, especially when they know they can learn what they want to learn! And here's another statistic showing yet again the harm such tests are doing in Hispanic and African districts. Only 16% of African students and 18% of Hispanic students passed in math and English!
About 3 years ago such Common Core tests were revised and made even more difficult to pass, and yet many districts around the country continue telling students such knowledge is necessary to learn for both college and business success! Is it? As we've seen already, 70% of students don't even go to college, and the percentage of students going into the corporate world is probably much less. And yet corporations like Bill Gates' Microsoft continue funding such undemocratic and idea-based educational programs! Have our corporate and government leaders really become the prisoners of their own dominating habits? For thousands of years, military, business, and governments have simply told people what to do, and much the same kind of controlling habits are still at work in today's world, helping keep it feudalistic and undemocratic. Such habits are even at work in the Democratic Party!! President Obama has offered money rewards for those states practicing a conservative Common Core method of education; as usual it’s been given a friendly-sounding name, Race to the Top! Considering how much of the economy and jobs are still controlled by our conservative corporate and political organizations, and how employment has been rather weak and anemic these past 5 years, more people are asking themselves if the Top is merely just another 3 letter word!
We liberals say our schools can start teaching much more democratic habits to the next generation, rather than autocratic and dictatorial ones. How can a Democratic Party celebrate and work to liberate women to control their own bodies, and yet work to keep parents, students, and teachers enslaved to an educational model created by academic professors and conservative think tanks? What kind of twisted and hypocritical logic is that?
Simply because most kids go to school, it's the best place to start teaching students much more intelligent skills and knowledge, especially how to experiment more intelligently! Besides, what learning isn't on-the-job learning? There is no school for future presidents or governors, and so they all learn on the job, while actively playing a leadership role! On the job they actively learn more about creative thinking to solve problems, and then test their ideas to see their results. So why shouldn't students be free to learn the same kind of intelligent habit in our public schools? Even presidents don't really learn about governing until they actually start playing a presidential role! Moreover, each day presents unique and special challenges to both learn and feel what new ideas are like, so why should it be any different for students? The more learning is reduced to mere memorizing or trying to analyze ideas, the more shallow and separated from life learning becomes. Such intelligently active work helps build the best kind of knowledge, skills, AND CHARACTER, so why make our schools, homes, and churches any different?
Yet that's exactly what's happening with the Common Core Standards now being taught in almost all states; they continue ignoring the useful arts of character development, as well as teaching students how to work with ease, comfort, joy, and thoroughness. How can anyone learn those important feelings merely from reading about them alone? If not, then another result seems obvious. Because many young folks even today still only weakly feel such important habit-arts, wouldn't it be a step forward if our schools began actively and formally teaching such useful and excellent character habits even in the 1st grade? After all, how can we expect our nation to keep growing more intelligent, democratic, and less irrationally impulsive if we don’t get better help from all our schools, homes, and churches, as well as our publicly funded governments?
Not nearly enough people realize, improving all our still feudalistic institutions which keep dominating others from the top down, is still very much a work in progress. Our schools are included. Because many continue using the academic and abstract Common Core Standards, we Deweyan liberals say all concerned parents, teachers, and students should start bothering their state representatives, demand an end to their controlling our schools, and asking for their help in making our public schools more democratic for all students! Governments will respond. President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, recently relieved some California districts from using such standards. As a result, students are a little freer to determine what they want to learn, just like consumers help determine what sells in the marketplace?
In truth, such academic standards keep diverting students from learning how to building a more democratic nation, based on free choice, equal rights, equal opportunities, and one focused on improving the public good. Women especially know what I mean. Only recently, within the past century, have women been working to give themselves more political and reproductive freedom, and thus now have more control in our governments, population growth, and professional lives. But they also know such freedom does not grow and spread automatically; like any freedom, they grow only with organized, active, persistent, and intelligent work. So, don’t even young students and their parents deserve respect and freedom to guide their own lives? It too will take some active and intelligent work. After all, only 400 years ago, almost yesterday in geologic time, fearful primitive spirit-habits and feudalistic organizations were practiced almost worldwide. In other words, the Middle Ages isn’t just a time span; it’s a whole set of habit-arts, many of which continue working even today.
Environmental pollution is also becoming more dangerous to the public good, as people like Dr. Helen Caldicott has been warning us about for decades. Global warming is becoming important as well. So, why shouldn’t young students be told how they can help work intelligently on those challenges? After all, in a few decades it’ll be their world, not ours. Why keep shielding children in our schools from first learning about such challenges, and then helping to intelligently overcome them in their own neighborhoods? What better way is there for them to start feeling how important and intelligent their own efforts and work can be? The more children are kept in conservative classrooms and working to learn more academic facts and ideas, the more difficult it becomes to keep our own earth as healthy as it can be. Such conservative models of education based on the Common Core Standards continue keeping students psychically separated from their own organic world.
Better and more democratic educational reforms and improvements are possible; nature and all human institutions are organic and best improved with intelligent work. A good example was the great Chicago School Reform movement beginning in 1988. It showed how organic and fluid the educational system is. However, without giving children and parents a choice for what is learned, and building more active workshops to learn in, the reforms kept producing the same student resentment as before, with about a 50% dropout rate, and where even about 50% of high school graduates still redd at an 8th grade level! (See Diane Ravitch's New Schools for a New Century). Clearly those kinds of results are more evidence: there is more to education than merely different versions of a conservative book-centered learning model! There’s the more intelligent and democratic kinds of reforms based on Dewey's liberal model of education, where learning itself becomes much more active, experimental, student and parent controlled, and community-based, just like it is outside of school. Unless students are taken out into their communities, even in 1st grade, and encouraged to learn all the ways they can keep improving them, then the next generation will remain psychically cloistered, self-centered, and divided from their own organic world itself, like medieval monastery life itself! Almost certainly what's called 'urban blight' and 'inner city decay' will continue plaguing our great cities, as it does in Oakland, California, Detroit, Michigan, and so many other cities. The more women are educated to learn other habits besides bearing more children, the easier improving life itself will become. Believe it or not, in some parts of our world young women get shot for even going to school!
In today's world of skyrocketing college costs it's becoming much more important to know how to start a business, rather than where to find a corporate job. More and more jobs are being shipped out to countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, where people will work for pennies a day. More people need to wake up and realize our ever-changing organic world continually creates more challenges for people, and the more children are shielded from knowing about them, and from learning how to work intelligently to overcome them, the more difficult life remains. Just because women have almost always been restricted to a mother role doesn't mean it must always be that way.
Wealthy unions, lawyers, and judges continue donating funds to politicians, who with public tax monies have continued building an entire network of expensive courts, prisons, and police systems. No doubt, the public needs to be protected from violent and destructive people, but when our schools aren't allowed to teach character excellence, then such destructive habits continue being passed on from parent to child, and increasing the need for more police and inhumane prisons. And what’s more, they become yet another way for investors to keep taking the public's tax money and maintaining the status quo, rather than increasing the public good. How can such conservative schools be justified when students aren’t taught useful skills and character habits, be sent to prison, and even keep returning to them, sometimes at the rate of 60%-70%! Without teaching young students some useful habit-arts, prisons have become mainly expensive and wasteful warehouses for mis-educated young folks!
We Deweyan liberals say better schools would be better able to help answers such challenges? Once again, if students would have had more positive learning experiences in school, and been taught what it feels like to intelligently start and run a business, then wouldn't it help make everyone's lives that much easier, less stressful, and more satisfying? Shouldn't children be free to go to business-oriented schools in their own neighborhoods? The more people learn about such educational options, the easier it’ll be to keep building the kind of society where children can actively and intelligently work in their own organic world, rather than merely learn more book-facts they don't need or want to learn. Pre-adolescent students simply don't have the same thinking power older students have.
For us liberals today, people have weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, rather than having sinful and evil natures. Thus, it's the role of education to show students how they can actively work to keep building more intelligent habit-arts, so they can keep learning what they want to learn. We liberals believe people are not made for corporations, but corporations are made to keep building the public good. The more people ignore that idea, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone, as the latest deep recession shows us yet again! For us liberals life is not something to merely suffer through as the result of continual sinning, or because we don't have a head full of academic facts. It’s something we all have the power to keep making more enjoyable and creative with our own neighborhood schools, where active, intelligent, enjoyable, and creative work is normal. How much of our welfare challenges are increased by our schools not teaching young folks how to work intelligently?