Page 1.5: Sections 23-27
23. TO ADVERTIZE OF NOT TO ADVERTIZE?
With apologies to Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford and known to the world as William Shakespeare: ...To advertise or not to advertise, that is our question. Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the endless repetitious slings and arrows of outrageously dull and boring commercial ads, or to take action against a sea of selling mo’ stuff, and with a TV remote gently press the mute button?
Not teaching students more about the very useful economic tool of advertising is used is yet another great weakness of our conservative public schools. In them it seems if some subject is useful in the adult world, as an advertising tool is, that’s reason enough not to teach it. I’m exaggerating of course, but not much. Have you ever seen a course in advertising taught in public school?
When I was putting this book together I redd an interesting article in the L.A. Times about whether advertising should be allowed in our public schools. It taught me a little more about our conservative educational model. It told about how California education officials were debating whether or not to allow commercial ads in the programs shown in school. To me, however, it seemed like yet another useless debate. Why on earth should children be kept from studying the art of ad making itself? In our advertising dominated economic system, why should any child be consciously kept from learning as much about that economic tool as possible, and thus be kept from learning how to use it and maybe even make an honest living with it? People have made very good livings while working in that field.
What’s more, persuasive forms of propaganda have been used for thousands of years, so why not learn more about the art? In fact we’re surrounded by them every day of our lives, so why not learn more about it? Not learning more about it merely keeps students immature and vulnerable to accepting ideas that can produce some really obnoxious results. Doesn’t all the corporate ‘feel-good’ advertising really cause people to ignore some of their obnoxious and harmful social results? After seeing ads for oil companies and investment firms you’d think they could do no harm. I’ve seen some great work being done in schools, but why not teach students more about something they already subconsciously know a lot about -- advertising? For 5 years students watch TV commercials before even going to school, and so already know much about them.
In June, 1992, the Times printed an article about that education debate. The California Superintendent of Education was said to want commercials out of programs students watch. As far as I know the policy is still in effect. But for us Deweyan who want to liberate and empower as many students as possible to work intelligently in the adult world, any idea like that should be quickly challenged. Why? Well, how many intelligent, useful, constructive, and creative STUDENT habit-arts can start growing by merely learning how to build commercial ads IN school? Wouldn’t such studies keep learning important adult skills like team-work, creativity, and video technology, not to mention the really important knowledge of psychology itself?
In other words, how much of what students are actually experiencing OUTSIDE of school, like watching TV ads, can become educationally worthwhile and fun IN school? Even at 5 years old children already have a tremendous amount of subconscious ad meanings from years of watching TV, all just waiting to be brought to a conscious level with active building projects. TV watching has become so routine for so many children their subconscious minds are already stocked with many feelings about them. And what normal kid doesn't like to clown around on camera or with singing, and see what it looks and sounds like? And, how many creative ads could be made for learning and education for everyone?
To say the least, such studies would continue breaking down the artificial dualism between learning inside and outside of school. For almost all practical purposes in conservative schools, learning is largely separated from learning outside of school. As we’ve seen, the first is basically passive and book-oriented, and the second is basically active and experimental. So, wouldn’t learning more about advertising in school help erase that artificial separation? What’s more, such knowledge would begin educating students about one of the most important subjects of all -- human psychology, not to mention keep building a creativity habit. If so, then wouldn’t students be much better prepared to start making decent livings and real contributions to society after high school, as well as knowing more about how to build healthier habits? So, shouldn’t more people be asking themselves if our public schools are really keeping children immature and unemployable, and thus creating the need for college and university degrees? Is that really the main reason our public schools have kept using a conservative book-oriented educational model?
Dewey helped use such practical questions about public education to build his own liberal model, so all those who don’t go to college would still have some useful skills when they graduate. Building such schools would thus help people learn more about scientific ART! Education too, like science, is something WE create with our questions, experimental answers, and tested ideas, hence it’s both an art and a science when it’s based on a reliable psychology. When parents, teachers, and church leaders help show students how to use their knowledge about, say, commercial ads, then they indeed not only practice liberal educational excellence, but also democratic excellence. Thus, life itself becomes more of a science and an art. Making ads is an art just because students create it, and it’s a science because they’re built experimentally.
With such learning options, students would begin learning more about one of the most important subjects of all, human psychology, and thus more about themselves! Why are there a variety of advertising commercials? What’s going on in people to cause such ads to be built? And for another thing, they would also learn how to create useful advertising art itself, and thus increase their own earning power after graduation. To us Deweyans, those are indeed 2 educationally excellent results. Can education get any better than when it empowers students to learn more about themselves, as well as how to make an honest buck? Yet, too many people are not asking questions like those.
With such active and experimental ad work, creativity would also grow stronger. If advertising is taught intelligently, with experimental testing, then creative thinking becomes a necessity. What’s the best way to sell something like dental health to someone? How should it be presented? With so-called hard sell or soft sell ads? Experimental learning’s 2nd step requires creative thinking to answer such questions, and then building a plan to test the answers. Otherwise creative impulses remain merely subconscious and weak.
Another useful result would be learning more about how to use modern technology, like cameras and acting; are those results are undesirable? Learning to use tools like camcorders, computers, and printers is a great help in many other fields too, not just in advertising. How many presidential elections have been won or lost with just some good or bad advertising? The attack ads are now a regular part of campaigns. In short, why continue letting our schools keep ignoring such useful studies, and keep students from learning how to use their creative impulses intelligently and profitably? If not, then more students will continue being tempted to keep hurting themselves with illegal drug and gang activities, mainly because few other options were given to them. The more such skills are taught, however, the stronger their own survival kit of intelligent habits will become, making life less dangerous for everyone.
If such results are real, then isn’t any debate about whether to allow commercial ads in school really the wrong debate? Wouldn’t a much more intelligent debate be about how soon students can start enjoying making their own commercial ads for things they would like to sell? Wouldn’t such work be more worthy of rewarding than mere diplomas every so often, or report cards twice a semester? If it is, then the best way to test the idea would be to actually start experimenting with it even in the primary grades, and see how students react to such work; isn’t that just like scientists test their ideas? It would also break down artificial differences between natural science and education science; they’re both experimental arts. In liberal schools both ideas are actively tested. How many students would enjoy such creative work, rather than merely sitting at their desks day after day and doing more book-work? Many studies show such book knowledge is soon forgotten anyway, simply because it’s not often used in the real world. In fact, allowing students to learn more about creative advertising is a good example of what liberal educational excellence can be; it’s an active learning art and science.
What‘s more, such work would also help the entertainment industry; ads for movies and TV shows are widespread. Who knows what advertising talents kids have until they’re allowed to express and experiment with their feelings? Thus, merely by experimenting with different kinds of selling art, it can lead to many useful employment possibilities.
Self-knowledge is another useful result of such work. What kind of ads do different students like best, and why? What makes some ads work on some people, and not on others; some ads great and some not-so-great? And of course democratic character excellence can be strengthened too: what’s the best thing to do with extra ad money, and how can we build better ads for democracy and equality. Are health, respecting just laws and others, and helping others good advertising subjects, or not, and if so, then how can we build good ones?
Ad Psychology
The more such liberal skills are intelligently built, the easier it becomes to CONSCIOUSLY start learning some basic human psychology, and thus start deepening the understanding of what's going on inside people. Such a study is almost non-existent in our public schools today, but advertising art is one of the most useful ways to start learning about human psychology. How many adults still don’t realize their own habits are being used by advertisers, with so-called hard and soft ads, to sell more stuff for their clients? Some ads are dictatorially hard sell, some are caressingly soft sell, some play subliminally on violent fantasies, many are laced with subliminal sexual objects, some are humorous and others serious, some appeal to kids and some to adults, and so on. In short, such studies help put students in touch not only with their own habits and feelings, but also with the world around them. In fact, advertisers are used to sell everything from deodorant to wars, so learning more about the art merely makes students better able to make intelligent decisions about their own lives, as well as make ads promoting democratic equality and fairness.
Why do some ads work best only with some people, and why do others work better with others? What makes some people grab the phone and order more useless and expensive stuff, while others laugh out loud at such hard-sell ads? What makes some people keep hurting themselves by going deeper into debt buying more genuine artificial antiques, while others smile and laugh? What makes some people automatically write a check for those saying they're helping orphaned puppies, kittens, and babies, while others say it might be just another scam and rip-off? In fact, knowing how people react to different ads is another useful way of seeing into a person’s inner world and feel what they’re feeling. What ads people like and dislike helps reveal those inner feelings, and thus makes it easier to help improve any of their weak, excessive, or unhealthful habits. Wouldn’t overweight students, for example, be better able to build more healthful diet habits if they knew something about fast food advertising?
Learning more about advertising, and the selling psychology BEHIND different ads, would also make it easier for students to liberate themselves from their own unhealthful impulses and habits! Why want something harmful, like fatty fast food, merely because they see pictures of it and someone says they should get it now!? The more students learn to want something based on their own healthful needs, the more liberated they become to live a more intelligent life. All such results can start growing with formal advertising studies. Why do some people keep spending their money enlarging their collection of antique toilets, cat collars, or string from around the world? Learning more about advertising psychology would help students begin feeling their own possibly excessive and unhealthful feelings and impulses, and perhaps realize they often reflect what their own parents bought and shopped for. The more those feelings grow, the easier it is to feel free, become your own person, and perhaps build more intelligent habit-arts.
In fact, the more advertising art is studied intelligently, the easier it also becomes to see how others are merely trying to manipulate people and separate them from their cash. Even wars are advertised to justify taking more money from taxpayers and giving it to weapons-making corporations! That US military industrial complex is a holdover from World War 2, but it’s up taxpayers to better control it. Even for it advertising propaganda means huge profits. During the Vietnam War, for example, Vietnamese were often called gooks and communists aiming to destroy the US. It was sheer propaganda but most Americans bought it; they were already convinced communists were all evil, and thus even sent their young children, many of whom were killed there. Today, however, many of our corporations have factories in Vietnam, so now we’re hearing different kinds of ads about it.
The recent bursting of a housing bubble is another good example of advertising propaganda. Home buying ads made people feel they could own a home just by signing on the dotted line and paying the bank a few thousand dollars. But when it came time to start paying the rising interest on their loans, many simply couldn’t and thus lost not only their homes but their savings as well. No doubt, it would have been less catastrophic if more people realized such ads were created by bankers to keep separating people from their money, many of which are now homeless.
Some ads appeal to people merely because of the elegant way they look. Elegantly dressed men and women often pose with expensive jewelry and furs. Anyone who’s seen the Sunday New York Times’ ads knows what I mean; their subtlety and elegant soft sell ads put them in a class of their own. Who is attracted to them? Those who already want the furs, clothes, and jewelry they see. In short, advertising has become a very sophisticated, creative, manipulative, and billion dollar industry art form! How many billions of dollars each year are spent in advertising, even when the economy is in recession?
Once again, such practical knowledge about advertising can help students not only protect the family’s bank account, but also learn more about the psychic impulses they already have. In truth, such knowledge is useful throughout life in a world swarming with people selling more and more stuff and junk, both legal and illegal junk. After all, consumers like you and me help build any economy’s health, so why not learn how to act more intelligently, rather than just remain impulsive and vulnerable? The more organized, aware, and intelligent we consumers become, the more healthful and intelligent our economy becomes! That too can be yet another important excellent result of advertising studies.
Who Wants To Be More Liberated?
Liberation from any harmful and dangerous impulses and habits, be they for another destructive war or criminal options, is best accomplished not with more irrelevant book-facts, but by learning to actually build more intelligent advertising skills. For us liberals that is done best with active and intelligent body-mind practice, like learning to see ads as another art form, see who they appeal to, and then build better and more healthful ones. Why not show fur buyers what the animals look like before they’re killed? And why not show people how they too might become homeless after losing their life savings to a bank? For us Deweyan liberals, focusing on learning such useful kinds of knowledge is liberal education’s main goal, rather than keep accepting whatever we see and hear on TV and believe it’s really the truth. Even news reports are another form of advertising; they tell us what we should be interested in, rather than what will help make us more intelligently powerful people! They too are works of art supported largely by advertisers selling one thing or another. Car makers and big banks often finance such network news shows, and so negative car reports are often ignored. In other words, learning how and why such artistic ads are built helps build more character excellence itself. What better way is there to keep from being subconsciously manipulated with ads and scams than learning how they’re built, who they’re aimed at, and what feelings they create? What do you feel after watching a big financial corporation ad? Warm and fuzzy, right? So, knowing more about the advertising biz not only helps free one’s self from its power, but also increase one’s knowledge of economic reality itself. Tom Edison learned how a telegraph worked before he improved it.
Socrates’ favorite saying -- knowledge is excellence -- has since been improved by one of modern science’s practical-minded founders, Francis Bacon: the best knowledge increases our intelligent power, not only to become more self-controlled, but also for helping others as well. In liberal schools the aim is teaching students to build more kind, democratic, and helpful ads. Why not learn how to make them? The more that happens, the more powerful and liberated students become in our money-driven world. In Dewey’s liberal educational picture, all such kinds of useful knowledge empowers students to intelligently build more useful habit-arts. Such energies can help make life more enjoyable as well as democratic and helpful. The more students actively build such ads, the more intelligent power they give themselves.
A Little History
In the 1800s the Industrial Revolution began harnessing scientific knowledge to make more and more products, some useful and some not. Ever since, the advertising business has become more important. In fact, modern culture has become saturated and soaked with advertising; they’re all around us, aiming to convince people they want what’s being sold. For example, in the 1920s stock market ads kept telling people the market will never go down and so they too will become rich if they keep giving brokers their money. As a result, millions did, and we all know how that ended; it’s called the Great Depression. What’s more, not only are fine-sounding ads used by corporations and business people, but also politicians at election time, the military, entertainment, religions, and anyone selling anything, be it a war, a candidate, sexual orientation, deodorant, and even promises of a “next” life. In such cases people are being asked to trust and accept what we’re being told, just like children are made to trust what they’re learning in our public schools is really the best kind of knowledge. One result is the continuing feudalistic economic, political, and educational systems we see today.
To us liberal Deweyans, why anyone should ignore teaching an advertising art to all students who want to learn that skill is more than a little baffling. Why keep anyone ignorant of the way the real world works? It just makes everyone’s life more dangerous and stressful. Do we really want to allow corporations to keep selling whatever they think is best, be it environmentally harmful products, worthless home mortgages, or even another needless war? In fact, we’re being told today the war on terror is on-going. How many Americans listened to President Bush 2 selling the idea of an Iraqi war in 2002, only to see he and many others really didn’t know what the weapons situation was in Iraq? It was all an advertising campaign! Meanwhile, thousands of innocent people lost their lives and many more were maimed because they believed and accepted his advertising. That’s what it was, mere advertising. If more people knew more about such events, wouldn’t more people be alive today and more taxpayers have more of their money to spend in more enjoyable ways?
Similar results happened in the 1990s when President Clinton advertised his North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He ad campaign told us illegal immigration would end and more Mexicans would have more jobs. However, when the ad ideas were tested, thousands of honest hard-working Mexicans lost agricultural jobs to American farmers, and then lost their lives after joining drug cartels battling each other over turf and profits. What’s more, many Mexican politicians and police have been bought off with drug money, thus making life even more stressful and dangerous in Mexico. Recently the entire city of Cuidad Juarez has become a war zone with bodies literally lying in the streets.
Real knowledge about advertising tactics is, in fact, a good way to better educate that new type of democratic individual Dewey saw as necessary for a healthy democracy. He too saw a democratic political system depends on people having reliable and useful knowledge about what’s going on in the world, here and now, not 2 or 200 centuries ago. Only those who’re freest to intelligently see what results ads are hoping to produce will better feel what politicians are saying and why they’re saying it. President Clinton told people in the late 1990s bank deregulation would be good for the economy, but in reality it’s produced the deepest recession since the Great Depression! No doubt, more advertising knowledge would help more people see blatant kinds of political talk as just that, advertising propaganda often sponsored by those wanting more taxpayer money. Who knows? One day we may even see an end to emotionally charged 10 second political ads attacking some candidate, and more intelligent debating between candidates. The more people keep rejecting such political ads, the more candidates might talk about their ideas and improvement plans for our country.
In the US, some 150 million consumers have a tremendous amount of economic power, but only when their actions are organized in more intelligent ways. Conservatives have often fought against putting anyone at the head of the newly created Consumer Protection Bureau; it would hurt profits for their corporate backers. Thus ads for more intelligent democratic actions become some of the best ads liberals can build. Our newly expanded electronic cyberspace is allowing more people to become better organized, but it needs to be intelligent as well. Nazis organized Germans, but look at the horrible results of that situation. Learning how to intelligently build ads promoting fairness and power-sharing would help make our systems less feudalistic and more democratic.
Supposedly about 2/3rds of our economy is consumer controlled, and thus depends on the buying choices people make; what people buy helps mold what is made, and creates new businesses for goods and services. But huge corporations can also produce environmental disasters as well. What’s the point? Well, the more students know about advertising forms, the easier it’ll be to see them all as mere propaganda. What matters most are the actual results of ad ideas; do they make life more healthful or more stressful? Who else besides we-the-people allow gun-makers, trophy-hunters, and environment polluters to stay in business? Why do we keep seeing ads for savory unhealthful fast foods unless people keep going to such restaurants? Is it because they never learned to see mouth-watering food ads as mere business art propaganda, designed to keep people spending their money while ignoring all the harmful results of such food? Is it because too many people haven’t yet taught themselves to see food ads as basically psychic triggers for their own diet habits, and so impulsively keep eating more unhealthful food?
Isn’t the best way -- the only way -- to gain real knowledge-power-freedom-liberation from profit-motivated ads actually knowing how they’re made and what feelings they create? Without such knowledge it becomes even more difficult to keep making and enjoying intelligent choices. Why should any kind and caring person want to deny such excellent knowledge to any young and vulnerable student, whether they’re 5 or 50? Since when is personal excellence the result of restricting excellent knowledge, instead of MULTIPLYING such knowledge?! Such practical kinds of studies like advertising are educationally empowering. It’s good to have accurate ideas about how the real world actually works and why it runs the way it does. How else can students become better at building more healthful habits, both psychically and physically? In fact such knowledge makes us less vulnerable to our own weak, excessive, and unhealthful impulsive and subconscious urges and whims, even those suggesting dangerous law-breaking and disrespectful actions. Any intelligent habit-art, including advertising, is, in fact, another helpful tool for building our own excellent survival kit!
Have We Entered A New Age?
Some advertisements tell us we have. Since 1900 our modern era can be seen as entering a 2nd stage of development – a neo-modern or even polymorphous age if you like large words; it just means many-sided or complex. Harnessing science's experimental testing art has indeed created more tools making life much more complex and involved. Teaching students how to intelligently use its advertising tools thus becomes even more important for growing a healthy power-sharing democracy. Do we really need that $50,000 car and feel others will envy us, as a car ad might imply, or should we accept liberal propaganda and use the money to help those in need? Shouldn’t more people be getting those kinds of ads too? How else can be keep building a strong and vibrant democracy? Aren’t those the subjects for ads students can be making? What kind of ads should we liberals be making? Should we make more expensive car ads or ones celebrating public transportation or even walking more? Aren’t those really the safest and best ways to travel? If we have entered a new age, then it too will be actively built by intelligent people.
For most everyone in the advanced world, life now is challenging us to keep improving the feudalistic systems passed to us from our ancestors. For us liberal Deweyans, among such systems are our conservative public schools. It’s why Dewey’s educational ideas are still needed; democratic forms of living are still young and growing. In liberal schools, then, students will begin seeing how advertising can be used to produce destructive or constructive results, and how constructive results are much more intelligent. In that process an intelligent advertising art definitely has an important role to play.
Dewey saw how useful intelligent experimental learning is for everyone, whether conservative, moderate, or liberal, and so his educational model was built around it. It helped free people from blindly accepting mere advertised ideas, and instead see them as forms of advertising, nothing more and nothing less! So, it's up to we-the-people to make that art more a part of our liberal schools, so students can keep building more intelligent ads about how life can be lived. When no nuclear materials were found in Iraq in 2003, President Bush and his ad people looked like just another gang of cheat propagandists aiming to keep making more money for those already obscene rich. In fact, his Vice President Chaney had worked at a corporation taking more of the tax payers’ money to keep making more war products.
Allowing students to intelligently create their own ads is yet another excellent use for experimental learning. Such an art can help make our young folks better able to earn an honest living, become more vibrant, interesting, intelligent, and productive people, as well as become better judges of any propaganda ads. But again, it won't happen for most students unless we liberate our public schools from a conservative book-centered model of education. Why shouldn’t liberal students learn how to make liberal ads? The question is how many people will start working for such educational changes; how many like my liberal ad campaign? Speaking religiously, the so-called New Age or Kingdom of Heaven on earth will almost certainly not be caused by a supernatural object, so if it evolves it will be the result of intelligent actions; if it happens, it will happen no other way. No doubt, that’s our human race’s greatest challenge.
24. IS HEALTH OUR GREATEST WEALTH?
If you didn't know the answer to that question, then you probably went to a conservative public school! Sad to say, even many students educated in our public schools don't yet realize everyone's health is our greatest wealth! As a result, in many neighborhoods young folks still see others as mere objects to dominate or control, rather than to help become healthier.
No doubt, our conservative public schools share some responsibility for such weak feelings about health. Many simply continue ignoring teaching the art of both learning about and improving one's health, both physical and psychological health as well! It's as if students didn't really have physical bodies and minds. True, school nurses are often available for injured and ill students, but formal instruction in body-mind health remains grossly neglected. At most merely one class a week is devoted to merely reading about health.
Do doctors have some power over that situation? Would they have fewer patients if students were regularly allowed and encouraged to actively practice good diet and exercise habits, as well as learn more about their own bodies? How many food corporations would see profits go down from unhealthful food sales? No doubt, there would be some results from such studies, but for us Deweyan liberals such public school neglect is certainly not a good policy for the vulnerable next generation. For us, student body-mind health is indeed our greatest personal and national wealth; the more it's neglected in our so-called 'exceptional' nation, the more tax money will be need for expensive government programs to deal with the obnoxious results of such neglect! Without body-mind healthy everything else in life is more difficult and stressful, as we're seeing with our government healthcare programs. So, a conservative educational situation neglecting health studies can no longer be tolerated by thoughtful and caring liberals; we care about teaching health to everyone, not just those in one's own social or religious tribe. As conservatives keep reminding us today, unhealthy people are affecting our political and economic health; more people with weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits keep needing expensive medical care.
To all liberal parents, teachers, and religious leaders this section offers a few more reasons why health studies should be the major subject even in our neighborhood public elementary schools. What might such health-oriented schools teach students, beginning even in the 1st grade? As we've seen, liberal schools not only teach students to guide our own growth and learning with intelligent experimentation, but in that process also help students start learning more about healthful and unhealthful body-mind habits. Clearly, in such schools health becomes a most important subject. Real and active practical healthy body-mind habits make becoming whatever students want to become easier and more satisfying.
Clearly, students in liberal schools are much freer to choose what they want to study; that's an important part of democratic and psychological health. One of Dewey’s early criticisms of conservative education was not giving students a choice about learning practical skills and habits. Here’s one example of what can happen when such education is practiced. A Chinese woman physicist tells how her father encouraged her to study whatever she wanted, and so she did. Eventually she became a Nobel Prize winner. Can you feel how psychically healthy the word ‘wanted’ is? The more students can learn what they want to learn, the easier it becomes to also teach them what body-mind health means in action. Even Nobel Prize winners need to know some basics about body-mind health. So, once again, we see another weakness of the conservative book-centered education model.
The results of that model, where learning choices are severely limited for many years, continue producing both personally and socially harmful results. Even conservative Plato said students should never be compelled to learn anything; they should have the freedom to choose. However, the great weakness of his system was to severely limit who should be educated. No doubt, many conservatives today might say the result will be educational anarchy? Will it? Isn't that the way the adult world operates? Besides, how can we know what results will be produced until we start actually testing such ideas? Clearly, considering all the social and personal unhealthful habits already encouraged in our public schools, the need for more health studies is obvious. Whatever skills and knowledge students choose to learn, whether it's athletics, business, or academic facts, they can all be used to help teach valuable and healthy body-mind habits as well! Ignoring that liberal educational model continues producing harmful social results around our 'exceptional' nation. Not only are large numbers of students dropping out of schools, 50% in some neighborhoods, but also unhealthful obesity is increasing, thus harmfully weakening the quality of life for millions of children and adults. So again, expensive publicly funded healthcare systems continue growing. More than 50% of all diseases are diet related.
Clearly, our conservative book-obsessed public schools are helping promote such results when they continue ignoring teaching students what healthy habits are, and also how to intelligently build them. How many millions of students never hear one word about dental or diet health, much less learn why they're healthy? And so many develop serious dental and weight-related problems causing economic stress as well; doctors and insurance companies want to be paid. So, doesn't it make much more sense to begin teaching children to first start learning more about their own bodies, what different organs do, and what foods and exercises best nourish and promote their health? After all, most 1st graders already know how to talk about their bodies, and so such studies would become a natural extension of what they already know.
What 1st grade classroom shouldn't have some models of the human body, both male and female, which students can sense, feel, see, and touch, as well as dismantle and re-assemble, even while wearing a blindfold? Later, such subconscious feelings can then be used to help them both read and write about their own body-minds, their feelings, ideas, and actions. In fact, even 1st grade classrooms can be set up with different kinds of doctor offices, including student psychological counselors, where younger students can more openly talk about their fears and worries, as well as how to keep making their own habit-arts more healthful and respectful with more intelligent actions? Eventually such offices could be run by older students studying to actually be doctors and counselors. In such classrooms older students would begin teaching younger students how important their own body-mind health is, no matter what else they study, thus helping them feel everyone's health is our most important subject. Without such intelligent habit-arts every civilized habit becomes more difficult and stressful.
In many ways our conservative public schools are a big contradiction to a conservative model of life. Conservatives regularly rant against the evils of big government, and yet the very schools they say are best are actually helping create the need for more government services needing more and more tax dollars! On the one hand they say government is the main problem, and on the other hand support an educational system creating the need for more government. The less intelligent students are, the more government services are needed. To us Deweyan liberals it's merely another example of inconsistent conservative reasoning. Their schools are teaching book-facts largely useless in the adult world, and then call government programs ‘creeping socialism,’ as if even our military isn't a form of socialism. As a result, many people stay confused about how to best keep improving our nation with our public schools. For many conservatives even our public schools should be privately run and controlled, as if no public school can ever teach students anything useful and healthful, or help improve serious social problems like crime, delinquency, drug abuse, obesity, heart and stroke problems, and so many other obnoxious social results of a weak educational system.
With confidence, then, we Deweyan liberals say the sooner students begin feeling how important body-mind health is, what it means in action, and how they can start learning more about how to build such habits, the less we’ll cheat ourselves and our children from learning about body-mind health.
Obviously not every student who is allowed to study what they want will win a Nobel Prize; Nobel Prizes aren’t given out for welding or auto repair excellence, although it might be a good idea. But why should that ever stop some concerned parents, teachers, and students from starting to build a more liberal neighborhood elementary school. Aren't all young folks valuable? In fact, what more practical knowledge is there than body-mind health, as mass killings around the nation by unstable people keep telling us? Liberal student-centered schools will not only help build real and useful student health habits, but also individual feelings of self-worth, self-confidence, self-mastery, and also respect for different kinds of peacefully personal habits as well! Such habits form the basis of all healthy democracies.
How many young potential criminals would benefit greatly from some caring counseling and healthful habit-building at the primary level? As we’ve seen, many parents still use physical punishment much too much, not to mention not teaching more healthful body-mind habits. Conservative schools simply haven't been that much help either; more often than not they encourage patriotic feelings, blind obedience to authority figures, learning trivial knowledge, and intellectual dependency, rather than learning what body-mind health means in action. How many patients walk into a doctor's office with little or no knowledge about health, and thus are vulnerable to paying doctors more money for useless tests and procedures? Such blatant exploitation of an uneducated public would become much less common if students learned more about body-mind health in our public schools. And the same goes for lawyers too. The more students know how our legal system works, the less vulnerable they'll be to predatory lawyers.
A Modern Model of Health
Health is our greatest wealth. It's an old saying, but true today as it was thousands of years ago. The educational problem, however, has been the dominance of a conservative model of the human body-mind, and thus teaching unintelligent kinds of healing arts. To this day Christian Science still uses praying as a basic healing art, and it's been practiced for thousands of years. No doubt, relaxing is useful to reduce muscular tension and cramping stress, thus allowing the body's naturally healing mechanisms to work more efficiently. But more and more people are learning spirit-ideas aren't really needed to justify building that kind of healthy stress-free relaxing habit. Simple meditation and relation habits are just as useful, and thus help all internal organs work much more smoothly and efficiently.
No doubt, some may still feel teaching young students healthy body-mind habits is really too big a challenge for our public schools. Many may feel students just should be protected from learning about their own bodily functions; it's too personal to learn about when they're so young, and the dangers of child abuse are too great. However, the more those ideas are practiced, the more vulnerable everyone’s health becomes! For example, as our population began exploding in the early 1900s, and huge urban disease-infested slums began sprouting like mushrooms, health became an important social problem. The deadly flu epidemic of 1919 killed some 20 million people worldwide, and unhealthful habits helped it spread. No doubt, it wasn't completely caused by slum dwellers, but their health ignorance certainly made it easier.
In any case, habits of intelligent body-mind health remain one of our greatest educational challenges, and more liberal democratic schools can better help answer it. They're simply student-centered, not book-centered. More evidence for making body-mind health the center of our public schools will be seen a little later, but for now I'll just mention a few more reasons for it. For example, an important Washington Post editorial of 9-18-09, written by Dr. Neal Barnard, helped make the case for such studies. In fact, to me his book Eat Right, Live Longer is a must read for everyone interested in building more intelligent and healthful eating habits. It's got some excellent advice for anyone who wants to start intelligently experimenting with their diet habit-arts, and it's mentioned in the Bibliography. Dr. Barnard not only mentions our growing diabetes problem in the US, and how it's diet related, but also how our own government is helping make the problem worse with it farming payments or subsidies!
Dr. Barnard mentions how today about 23 million Americans now require medical treatment for diabetes, and in 2007 the taxpayer cost for it alone was estimated at $174 Billion! That is definitely not a small amount of taxpayer money! For people like me used to dealing with hundreds of dollars, that amount is almost incomprehensible; it indeed is a lotta dough, so to speak. And as if those numbers aren't scary enough, it's projected more than 55 million more people will soon become diabetic unless they start building more intelligent diet habits and cutting down on their sugar and calorie intake! Simply said, the heavier people are, the more vulnerable they become to many diseases, like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. Eating excessively high-calorie food day in and day out, combined with little exercise, makes it more difficult for the body to keep making insulin to break down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars the body can then use. And when insulin production stops, life-threatening comas and death may soon result, as many diabetics soon learn!
Also, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease already affect some 90 million Americans these days, about 33% of the nation, costing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to treat! Both those diseases are made much worse with high calorie diets, artery-clogging saturated fats, as well as refined sugars and carbohydrates, like white potatoes, white flour, and white sugar. Such fats collecting in the heart's nourishing arteries, can eventually stop blood flow, and thus cause sudden heart attack. Needless to say such folks are an one way road to the Big Sleep, as some in Hollywood call it. For those who can afford it, the best quick cure is an expensive heart-bypass surgery, or even a heart transplant; a while ago even a former vice-president had such an operation, after which, of course, he began building a more healthful diet habit based more on fruits and vegetables. But what about all those people who don't have expensive government health insurance?
So should more people be asking, wouldn't it be much more intelligent to simply teach children in our public schools what excellent diet habits are and how to build them, so fewer of them would need to rely on others to pay their medical bills later on? After all, we already owe the Chinese and Russians hundreds of billions of dollars for helping finance our recent 2 unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention a new drug program and the recent huge multi-billion dollar Wall Street bailout! So, why keep unnecessarily spending more on healthcare?
Enough said? No way. Unfortunately our health challenges don't end there in what some conservative like to call the world's most exceptional nation. There's more and it gets even scarier for taxpayers. (Who ever said diet philosophy is irrelevant and boring?) Again, according to Dr. Barnard, some of our own government subsidy programs seem to be making such problems even worse! How, exactly? Well, it's fairly easy to see how that happens; it's not rocket science. To help keep cattle and dairy farmers from going broke, the government buys unsold grains from farmers, like soybeans and corn, then sells them to cattle and dairy farmers to help fatten up their cows for market. Such government payments have been a reality for decades. What's more, the government also buys meat and milk from those farmers, helping them stay in business. About $20 Billion taxpayer dollars a year is spend on such socialized farm payments. Now here's where it gets a little scary. The government then gives the less-than-best meat and whole milk foods to school districts around the country to help feed over 30 million poor and hungry children, the same children profit-obsessed conservative politicians target for reduced funding! For them it's perfectly alright to spend some $600 billion taxpayer dollars a year on our weapon-making military-industrial complex, but not a few billion to feed hungry school kids! In any case, however, less-than-excellent foods are going to millions of kids, thus making body-mind health more difficult!
Not helping our schools focus more on teaching body-mind health as our greatest wealth remains yet another major liberal challenge for all taxpayers. The challenge is simply stated: Can enough people organize themselvs at the neighborhood level and start building more liberal schools one year at a time, so the public good can grow stronger. If not, then at least one dangerous conclusion seems obvious: If student aren’t allowed to better educate themselves about body-mind health, then it will remain easy for profit-obsessed food corporations to continue taking advantage of them with all their seductive advertising and government help, thus creating the need for higher taxes to pay for those who can’t afford health insurance. Currently, 26 conservative-run states are denying poor folks such insurance!
Today obesity is becoming a new kind of killer flu for more than 3 out of every 10 people in our 'exceptional' country. Instead of being taught what good nutrition feels like, and why it's good nutrition, TV ads keep encouraging young folks to buy many unhealthful corporate fast-foods, many of which are calorie loaded with deep-fried fats, sugar, salt, and refined flour. It's yet another result of living in a profit-obsessed 'exceptional' nation. Many studies have already shown such foods are not the healthiest to eat, even though they may taste great. As a result, the dietetic foundation of dangerous diseases like cancer and the greatest killer of all, heart disease, begins growing when people are most vulnerable, when they're children.
Some good news is this: Exceptional people who care about both personal and social health in our nation can start making a difference right in the own neighborhood schools, homes, and churches! They can begin insisting their schools teach young folks about their own organs and what they do, what nutritious foods taste like, and how unhealthful foods like excess alcohol and refined foods affect their organs, rather than merely continuing ignoring such useful and healthful knowledge!
These are, indeed, some of the major educational challenges liberal and independent people everywhere are now facing. Parents are challenged to demand their own neighborhood schools teach students to actually grow and cook nutritious foods in school gardens and greenhouses, rather than merely working silently at their desks and eating government-sponsored industrial foods in their cafeterias. As we've seen, a conservative educational model helps produce more 'silence of the lambs,' as one film was called. In fact, large food corporations created during World War 2 to feed millions of soldiers, kept selling less-healthful refined and high calorie foods after the war, using refined grains, white sugar, fatty meats, and unhealthful oils, while potent alcohol and tobacco continued harming public health as well. Their attitude can be summed up like this: Damn the social health of our 'exceptional' country, give the public what they want and the devil take the hindmost; that might be a mantra of our profit-obsessed corporations as well.
Needless to say, while students in conservative schools continued studying more and more abstract book-facts year after year, cancer rates, heart attacks, and strokes soared after World War 2, my father included, thus making healthcare a bigger problem than ever before. Who knew how to eat and exercise intelligently when such knowledge was almost completely ignored in school as men went to work and women raised a family? TV ads suggested to women meat should be a part of every meal. After all, cattle ranchers and fast-food corporations all had bills to pay. As a result, few learned how really unhealthful those corporate-made foods really were! Many doctors now believe refined white sugar is one of the most toxic foods anyone can keep putting into their body. For one thing it causes more prostate problems in older men. Unhealthful high calorie foods were made to taste great with the help of fat, sugar, and salt, and so people ate them. Today, however, more people are realizing such high calorie foods merely make it easier for cancer cells to grow. In our 'exceptional' US, women soon had the highest rates of breast cancer in the world, while those who kept eating a fruit-vegetable-seed-and-nut based diet had much lower rates of cancer and other health-wrecking diseases.
In the 'exceptional' US it's projected about 1 in every 8 women will get breast cancer, but instead of teaching children better eating habits, drug-makers have continued attacking the resulting diseases, rather than their diet-related causes. After all, it's much more profitable for them to sell drugs than teach children to eat intelligently and respect our own 60 million year old primate evolution encouraging mainly a fruit and vegetable diet.
In so many ways, the ancient experimental-minded doctor Hippocrates had it right: good food is the best medicine. However, for many overweight people today their tongue has become their own worst enemy! Fried fat, salt, and sugar tastes great, so keep eating them. Thus another important question becomes: Is what we're allowing to happen in our conservative classrooms the most intelligent way to build a truly healthy and exceptional nation? Should taxpayers continue allowing those kinds of public schools to keep ignoring health studies, and instead rely more on drugs and government spending for medical care, or should they begin demanding more health-based liberal schools be created?
As we'll see in Sections 35-39 it's fairly easy to design more liberal schools based on body-mind health -- both physical and mental health. Simply because there's much evidence such schools would best help make peoples’ lives more excellent, it's wise to start building such schools here and now! And if not now, then when? They would help better control some serious and threatening personal and social problems, like rising healthcare costs, crime, and homelessness. If so, then why shouldn't they begin growing and replacing our more conservative schools? Then more students will have some real useful experience to make abstract high school studies much more meaningful and worthwhile. After all, if such abstract facts aren't anchored to a person's feeling, then they're soon forgotten. In fact, aren't healthy body-mind habits even more fundamentally important than both book-centered classes? Health studies can be an excellent way to lead into more abstract college-prep and vocational courses, and best of all, they can begin growing even at the primary level! How many kids can begin increasing their psychologically healthy habits just from practicing some basic skills of politeness and respect? In fact, no one knows for sure how much domestic violence in our 'exceptional' country would be reduced if such healthy psychological habits were taught.
More healthful eating can also reduce another dangerous result. Parents and teachers often don't realize how easy it is to eat foods infected with harmful and dangerous bacteria. It becomes a bigger possibility when conservative reduce government spending on food inspectors; in such cases is government still the problem, or a big part of the solution for profit-obsessed farmers? Certainly not all of them are, but some definitely are. And, also, by eating much animal meat and drinking whole milk, both high in saturated fats and low in important roughage, such unhealthful food habits, helped again by our own government, helps cause more diseases later on, and thus increase the need for more tax money! Who realizes cow's milk has evolved as a food for cows, not people? It has much too much unhealthful fat in it? And when is the last time you had a non-fat pizza? Without more intelligent health studies, few people will realize milk made from sesame seeds has not only less harmful fat, but also more calcium than cow's milk!
In other ways our corporate-dominated government is working mainly for profits and thus against the public good. For example, about 50% of medical costs are now paid by the government, and it's sure be keep growing. It makes the phrase 'vicious political circle' more meaningful, doesn't it? The more government-sponsored conservative schools generally ignore teaching excellent student health habits, the more tax money is needed to treat the diseases they help cause. Liberal schools focusing on body and mental health would be one way to help improve our less-than-excellent public schools, as well as our national health. Dewey thought more liberal child-centered schools were the best and most intelligent way such improvements can happen. No doubt that's true, but that idea makes 2 important assumptions: 1. people already know what they want their schools to teach, and 2. teachers are free and flexible enough to start teaching them! So far both of those assumptions look rather naïve. In reality most everyone has no idea what liberal education can look like, and government laws like No Child Left Behind keep acting as a drag on improving our schools; both state and federal laws make school improvement difficult at best. However, one place such assumptions can become more powerful is in our homes and liberal churches. In them such a liberal educational model is easier to grow.
In truth, an active, informed, and intelligent public is the best weapon against all our 'exceptional' feudalistic systems, where a few live like royalty and most everyone else remains undereducated about those systems themselves, much less how to improve them! So, the more people learn about our liberal educational model, and how body-mind health is at its center and core, then the easier it'll be to start reducing their harmful and unhealthful personal and social results. For example, the more children learn how certain foods help weaken their bodies, like high-calorie sugared sodas, the easier building better habits become. Often, schools would rather remove such foods from students rather than teach them healthful diet and exercise habits, so they can build their own healthful will power.
Also, with a more intelligent farm policy in Washington, where unhealthful foods are not given to students, learning about body-mind health would be easier. It would help students learn a diet habit based on seeds, grains, fruits, and vegetables uses far less energy, chemical fertilizers, and land than it takes to keep feeding growing cattle, pigs, and chickens for food! Thus taxpayers could save some money in farm subsidies. In Japan, for example, where people are eating more cattle meat, both heart and blood pressure problems are increasing; maybe one day they'll become as 'exceptionally' healthy as we are; let’s hope not. If liberal vegetarians are right about diet, then we might all see our health problems and taxes go down. As always, the only way to find out for sure is to begin experimenting in our own neighborhood schools, homes, and churches, where students are free to intelligently build community gardens. And, the more parents and students demand more healthful foods from our fast-food corporations, the sooner it'll become a reality.
No doubt, some doctors and farmers would need to make some adjustments, but what industry or profession doesn't need to keep changing as people become more educated? If the oil industry, for example, wasn't so focused on paying for Arab oil, maybe they could start buying bio-oils to burn in diesel engines; it would make us more energy-independent, produce cleaner air, and thus allow more money for improvements in our own 'exceptional' country. Imagine what the Mojave and Sonoran deserts would look like if more water were piped from the water-rich Pacific Northwest.
What's more, these days, population-control has become another very important health problem. In many places already too many people are causing life to be little more than subsistence living. Luckily, more knowledge about and use of birth control is growing for millions of people, but it's still not enough. In the 'exceptional' US, in many European countries, and in Japan, Russia, and China the birthrate in gradually becoming better controlled and even lowered. It's definitely a sign of intelligent health habits. Like anything else, human population has its natural limits, beyond which the quality of life becomes more primitive and stressful. That's the good news. The bad news is conservative schools, especially Catholic schools, might not be making young folks more aware of a population problem, or about global warming either. Unless we start educating students about such health challenges, and also how students themselves can help reduce such dangers, high human standards of living will become more difficult to maintain. If global warming continues, places like Canada, northern Russia, Greenland, and Antarctica just may become some of few places people can live comfortably.
Choosing Builds Psychological Health
As mentioned earlier, both adults and students like to have a choice about what to learn. Having little or no choice amounts to a kind of intellectual slavery. As we’ll see when we look at something called the 8-Year study in Section 31, students who guided their own learning and education enjoyed and learned more than kids in conservative schools, and they were often better motivated to keep learning in college. Also, they already knew how to learn what they wanted to know more about; they were more familiar using learning resources. Obviously it wasn’t just because they could choose their classes, but such freedom helped increase their desire to learn, making their school work even more productive. Certainly from my own experience I enjoyed having a choice of classes, in high school, and later giving my students a choice of subjects. When I taught at a private school I asked my Psychology class what they wanted to study first; almost all chose the chapter on Abnormal Behavior. It thus became easier for them to write and give reports on different kinds of abnormal behavior, as well as becoming better able to judge their own actions too! It seemed most everyone wanted to learn more about it, and thus be better prepared to help themselves and others improve their weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts by enjoying more intelligent actions.
Once students choose what to learn about, then all the other important academic knowledge and skills like good reading and writing can be quickly learned, thus building a healthier psychological confidence. The more confident students are, the easier anything becomes. So, if young students can, say, choose to learn more about police work, then it will be easy to learn about the mathematics, science, history, and writing skills they’ll need to become good law enforcers. And what works for police work can also work for any subject, from athletics to biology to business skills. Thus, learning itself becomes much more natural, rather than passive, artificial, and merely book-centered. Be honest now, aren't all subjects really organically connected and scrambled together anyway, so why keep children thinking they can’t really learn useful skills while learning want they want to learn?
In general, having the freedom to choose what to learn in more liberal schools makes school more naturalistic, less stressful, and therefore less artificial. Without such freedom, however, education can quickly become just another racket, so to speak. In fact, one time a young teacher in a conservative public school callously asked me: “Haven’t you got a racket yet?” She certainly wasn’t talking about playing tennis either. Indeed, forcing children to learn facts they have little interest in learning might be a good definition of an unhealthy educational racket, as low US test scores and high drop-out rates keep telling us. No doubt, if more parents and students knew more about a liberal educational model, that kind of situation would become easier to improve.
Limited-choice, book-centered conservative public schools simply take the active element out of healthy learning itself. Objective social events like crime and homelessness continue suggesting many of our own public schools are a kind of socially tragic 'racket'. In general, they continue ignoring teaching 70% of the next generation skills and knowledge useful after they graduate.
To be sure, there are some very dedicated and caring teachers and administrators working in our public schools, but to a great degree they too are enslaved to our restrictive education laws and the accreditation people who keep telling us academic trivia is really the best knowledge to know and your children will be severely punished in life if they don’t learn what we say they should learn.
As we've already seen, ancient liberal Greek Sophists focused on teaching useful and practical social skills like debate, legal skills, and even useful household management skills. They gave young men a choice about what practical skills they wanted to learn. Without such learning freedom many young men remained less able to live in a democratic society; how can you intelligently judge a debate when you don’t know good debating habits? In fact today all the abundantly useful ‘How To’ books we have are direct descendants of the books Greece’s humanist Sophist teachers wrote over 2,000 years ago, like good speaking and debating skills, and they’re still very important skills of a healthy body-mind! A well-working democracy demanded it, even if it served only male citizens. With more freedom of choice, even in their widespread slave-dominated civilization, many liberals began talking about human equality -- one of 2 unmistakable signs of a healthy democratic body-mind, the other being actually practicing the art.
If so, then isn't it time we start giving public school students the freedom to choose what to learn? Wouldn’t our schools, neighborhoods, and socialized public parks be much easier to keep making more user-friendly if more students could choose to learn such active, healthful, and constructive skills like landscaping, carpentry, running a business, pottery, and social art? What mathematical, scientific, and historical knowledge do such skills have? And wouldn't it make the habit-art of working joyfully that much easier to learn? How can we keep improving our neighborhoods themselves, and continue growing as people, if we don’t nurture such healthful psychological habits in the next generation? Because many kinds of manufacturing businesses have been taken to other countries, where labor-costs are cheaper and profits are higher, intelligent business skills in our 'exceptional' country have become even more important for body-mind health.
Dental health is important too. Recently, as school funds have been shrinking, districts keep allowing sugar-loaded soft drinks to weaken the dental health of our own children. Such drinks are still commonplace in many schools even at the Middle School level, with 11 and 12 year olds. So, because of school district money needs student health itself is being weakened. To the extent it’s allowed in our 'exceptional' country, its legalized harm to even pre-teens, and for what? Merely so they’ll have a head full of soon-forgotten academic facts and more dental bills? Students don’t need caffeine and sugar drinks, they need schools where they can learn what healthy habits feel like.
We liberals take such public school events as yet more evidence, many parents still haven’t taught themselves their own schools can teach body-mind health to even young students, and help them to start building a set of healthy, intelligent, and forceful habit-arts. Adults too can begin learning more about liberal education, or else our schools will remain both personally and socially less than excellent. The last I heard California has banned such drinks from school campuses; chalk up another small baby-step for our side!
Perhaps my ‘Boomer’ generation’s good works aren’t over yet; perhaps there’s still hope for a generation that supported the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars, as unhealthful as they were for our exceptional nation. Perhaps more retired folks like myself will take a little time and help build a few more liberal schools before our own Big Sleep. Stranger things have happened, right? In any case, however, if more intelligent actions don’t come from citizens themselves, then it probably won’t happen. Since 1980 people with undemocratic passive and accepting habits have sheepishly kept allowing their politicians to keep lowering taxes on the wealthy and allow corporations to gain more economic power by deregulating useful business laws. And with a more conservative Supreme Court saying there should no limits on corporate campaign donations, upper class power has become more powerful than ever before.
In liberal schools, then, choosing what to study as a part of psychological health can no longer be ignored. It makes it easier for excellent habits to keep growing, even for our future police officers. Excellent officers can no longer ignore knowing more about psychological health itself. It’s simply the art of learning more about peoples' feelings and impulses, and then using such knowledge to treat others more respectfully. Really now, how can we expect our world’s oldest ‘exceptional’ democracy to become our world’s best democracy unless we encourage students to learn more about psychological health and the art of democratic free choice, respect for others, and equal rights?
Relax, Will Ya??
It’s probably not possible to define health in every way, or as Socrates and Plato wanted, in an abstract way for all situations, but a few more practical ideas might be useful. Obviously, the rampant and widespread social using of stimulant and sedative drugs is yet another sign people could learn more excellent kinds of body-mind relaxation. Such drug use tells us students aren't learning enough about body-mind relaxation and how to enjoy life without relaxation drugs. A useful relaxing habit-art can begin growing with just a few minutes of practice daily. In fact, I'm still working to rebuild my unhealthful tension habit-arts, and I'm probably not the only one who still feels upper back and neck tension while merely standing at a corner, waiting for the Walk sign. So, this is another important fact of life: the more people practice the simple art of letting go of useless tension, the easier it becomes. Such a relaxed habit is an important part of body-mind health; it increases concentration, makes it easier to study, experiment, and work, as any person who’s had a nervous breakdown can tell you.
How can young students beginning learning such a healthful habit-art? It may be easiest to teach them than any other age group! Their muscles are still relatively loose and not overly tense. So the educational challenge becomes bringing those relaxed body-mind feelings to a conscious level of awareness. That way it’ll be easier to talk about and experiment with them, and thus help unify bodily feelings and mental ideas. For thousands of years millions of people have learned Eastern meditation arts, and what it feels like to relax and let go of useless and unhealthy tensions; it’s symbolized in statues of religious leaders. We Deweyan liberals certainly aren’t endorsing any spirit-ideas, but in how many of our Western schools are such healthful relaxing habit-arts still neglected, even for 15 or 20 minutes a day? How can students know what it’s like to work tension-free if they haven't yet felt what it's like to be tension free? It’s like asking a virgin to practice great sex, or a radical conservative politician to think more openly.
Learning how to relax a tensed body-mind is another healthy habit-art, best learned with active practice. So, maybe it's time we asked ourselves if our Western public schools, homes, and churches might benefit from teaching such relaxing habits. When's the last time you saw meditation classes in your neighborhood school or church? Considering how many relaxing sedative drugs are sold each year, amounting to billions of dollars for huge drug companies, I’d say the world's oldest 'exceptional' democracy is rapidly becoming a nation of nervous wrecks. The recent legalizing of relaxing and tension-freeing marijuana in Washington state and Colorado are more evidence: a healthful relaxing habit-art should be a regular part of all liberal schools, if only for a few minutes each day.
Clearly our conservative book-oriented schools could be doing more to help build such healthful habit-arts in all students. How much are those academic-trivia obsessed schools making many of our social problems worse by not teaching such healthy habits to all students? Is the tremendously alarming rise in unhealthful fast food eating, dangerously high obesity levels, and all their unhealthful illnesses really being helped by our own schools when they ignore teaching students what it feels like to relax and let go of useless tensions? After all, the more relaxed people are, the easier it becomes to feel their unhealthful impulses and make more intelligent choices based on future results, rather than present pleasures. Such relaxing skills could even be taught in Physical Education classes. It would cost almost nothing for students to spend a few minutes each day building such a habit-art, and the more it's practiced in the primary grades, the easier it becomes in the upper grades. They could then use those feelings to make life itself more relaxed and less tense. In fact, such healthful skills are useful all during life, day after day after day; I know that for a fact. Many Asian schools already practice such relaxing habits. And they’re even more healthful when they're coupled to humorous and fun talking and acting! Even healthful body-mind exercise itself can be improved by learning to use only the muscles needed in an exercise and relaxing all the other ones! Is that a contradiction in terms? Not at all! The more I use only the muscles I need to exercise, the more refreshed I feel after exercising.
As ancient Greeks showed us, physical training has been a major part of Western education for thousands of years. The Spartans took it to extremes with their obsession for violent military habits, but even they also taught the art of relaxing as well. History's 'father' Herodotus tells about an event during the Persian wars. As thousands of Persians were finally pushing through a narrow pass at Thermopylae they saw the Spartans relaxing, oiling their hair, and taking life easy, even though they were soon to die in battle. And of course Plato tells us Socrates too was very relaxed in prison while waiting to drink his cup of hemlock. Such tension-free habits, even while facing death, were a part of Greek education; their weakness, however, was in not being used more intelligently. Too many felt war was indeed the noblest way to die, and so intelligent cooperative habits became less important. When, however, relaxing habits are practiced intelligently, it becomes easier to build more constructive habit-arts.
Obviously we don’t all need to become Olympic decathletes or Spartan warriors, but without enjoying and savoring some relaxed and healthful forms of exercise on a daily basis, even if it’s only a little tension-free walking, our body-minds may work less than excellently. Without feeling what relaxed exercise is like on a daily basis, useless muscular tenseness and stress continues making life more irritating and less enjoyable. Thus exercising itself becomes more difficult. Also, have you noticed how stiff and ‘frozen’ older folks are? Is it the result of an unhealthful diet plus not ever learning how to relax and move around?
Anthropologists tell us our H. erectus ancestors of 1 million years ago were such good walkers they slowly migrated from Africa to Europe and Asia as well! Life was simple, so it was easy for their young folks to learn relaxed hunting and gathering kinds of habit-arts. And yet today many of us still haven’t learned how healthful simple relaxed walking is. With the invention of air-polluting cars many people simply never built that relaxing and healthful habit-art. Today auto-caused global warming seems already helping cause social havoc to millions of people around the world. How many people like to ride around in their cars just because it makes them feel more important and powerful, while not thinking about how they’re increasing global warming, polluting our air, and endangering our own earth?
Without such healthful relaxing habit-arts, more and more people remain overly tense and stressful within their own body-minds; have you ever tried worrying when you were relaxed? For tense people relief often means taking more relaxing drugs or drinking more alcohol. Many such people thus become their own worst enemy. Even some football players are now realizing the game itself is dangerous to their health. And, how many parents complain about their children not being able to sit quietly and read something with feeling and emotion, while they themselves are using drugs to relax? Is relaxing really that healthful? In fact, it helps make everything easier, even helping others with some extra money. Recently, feeling more relaxed has helped me cut down on my moderate caffeine use too. Now if I can keep avoid getting hit by some distracted texting driver, I just might live for a few more years.
Relaxing helps produce another healthful result. It becomes easier to believe pills might not be the best solution to all medical problems. Sometimes the side-effects of some drugs are worse than the disease! How many people ever ask themselves this thoughtful question about relaxing sedatives: Are they the best way to relax and enjoy life? In liberal schools, however, it becomes easier to build such healthful habit-arts, and thus make learning anything that much easier.
For many young folks and adults many sedative drugs are a one way ticket to the island of relaxed FEELINGS! No doubt if more of us spent more time in primary school learning what healthful relaxation feels like, and how to practice it while we work, then, almost certainly, fewer students would feel less need for such drugs; for how many teenagers and adults are such drugs the doorway to more powerful addictions? So, again, we liberal Deweyans ask this question: Are teaching students what 'Shakespeare' wrote hundreds of years ago about Prince Hamlet or Julius Caesar more important than teaching students to more easily feel their own body-mind tensions, and how to let them go? The results of not teaching such relaxing habits in our public schools affects the nation's mental health too. How many parents are still convinced little 8-year old Jane or Johnnie really needs to learn more academic trivia day in and day out, even though they’ll probably never go to college? In fact, history has many examples of smart kids eventually having nervous breakdowns because they were never taught to intelligently let go of their own excess tensions; John Stuart Mill was merely one of them.
Obviously some academic knowledge can be useful, especially when something needs to be built, anything from an evening meal to a better transportation system. And as Dewey said, such knowledge is useful for that minority going on to college to become teachers, scholars, and researchers. But for the large majority of public school students such academic knowledge is not only unhealthful, but in many ways crippling to body-mind health as well. Often in conservative book-centered schools there’re no healthy results from knowing such knowledge, no self-knowledge, and no purpose except perhaps to keep students busy and get a good grade! The teacher says read this, so they read it. As a result, the valuable habit-art of body-mind health is kept weak at a time when it's most receptive to learning new habit-arts! Plato saw it too; to build his ideal state he said all people over 10 years of age should be expelled.
The German existential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once observed: Everywhere there reigns an indecent haste. I agree. In fact, it seems truer today than ever before. As a result, it’s easy for people to become psychically disconnected from social reality itself; their all-important attention gets removed from here and now, thus endangering more people around them. How many people now keep talking or texting on their cell phones while driving, even though it's against the law? Thus simply relaxing becomes more difficult as is learning other important habit-arts, like intelligent voting for example. Just in the past 30 years in our 'exceptional' US, corporations have generally neglected raising workers’ salaries, and so for many families 2 incomes have become necessary to stay out of bankruptcy court as prices keep rising. So, how can more liberal progressive candidates be elected to help better control our economy when voters stay tense and distracted from what’s happening here and now? As a result, for many people life becomes hasty, hastier, hastiest. Is it possible war has become a necessary safety valve for releasing peoples’ uncomfortable, annoying, stressed-out, uncontrolled, and unhealthful muscular tensions? As we’ve seen many times, improving the healthful body-mind art of playfully relaxing, savoring, and enjoying life here and now must be ACTIVELY PRACTICED to be learned! It simply doesn't work any other way, and our public schools could be helping more to build such healthful habits. At the very least, they should be allowed to experiment more with such habits.
25. WHAT ARE IDEAS?
First off, why ask silly questions like that? Don’t most people already know ideas reflect nature’s truth, and some become Laws of Nature? But to us liberals that kind of answer is no longer considered the best one, and if it’s not, then the entire conservative educational model of merely learning more and more book ideas becomes at least questionable, and at most replaceable.
In fact, as we’ve been seeing, there’s another more modern way of looking at ideas other than reflecting what’s already true. It’s a liberal way of defining ideas and it’s based on how ideas are used in our strongest learning method, experimental learning. So, for us liberals, seeing more reasons why Dewey’s liberal definition of ideas is better, also helps us see why our conservative book-oriented schools aren’t the best. The clearer his liberal definition becomes, the easier it is to see why our public schools should focus on active intelligent experimentation rather than merely reading more and more book ideas.
No doubt, to many people that question about ideas is already settled and answered, but upon different answers to that simple-looking question rests our 3 basic philosophic models of life and nature – liberal, moderate, and conservative. The many reasons for our liberal definition of ideas will become clearer when they’re compared and contrasted with the traditionally conservative definition mentioned above.
As we’ve been seeing throughout these pages, conservative and liberal definitions of ideas helped build Western civilization’s 2 main education models! They helped define what we can know, what we can’t, and also the best method of learning! Clearly, those 2 vastly different definitions are fundamentally important for education philosophy. For example, if a conservative definition of ideas mentioned above is accepted, then the education goal becomes reading about more and more eternal and unchanging kinds of ideas, like religious and scientific laws, mainly with a book-centered reasoning method. We're told, the more such ideas are known, the more educated students become. However, if a liberal definition of ideas is accepted, then we get a very different education model, one based on intelligent experimental actions, not just learning more and more ideas.
Our 2 basic definitions of ideas began growing in ancient Greece, as did most other philosophic ideas.
Earlier we saw how conservatives like Plato said ideas actually reflected already-existing eternal and unchanging objects. For example, the idea of 'mankind' reflected an eternal and unchanging model of mankind, and so studying it would reveal mankind’s eternal and unchanging nature. Thus, future government leaders should study ideas like truth and justice to learn their eternal meanings, so they could build the most stable, reliable, and unchanging political state. In such a state the rulers would use their eternal knowledge to arrange things so everyone knows their rightful place, accepts it, and thus peace and justice will finally become realities. After all, the eternal idea of justice probably means everyone gets what they really deserve. The result, then, would be basically a routine feudalistic society always and forever immune to change and decay, like the eternal Spirit-Ideas themselves. With their definition of ideas, conservatives thus emphasized rational and logical thinking; for them ideas represented rational and logical objects already in nature.
However, the liberal definition of ideas as celebrated by sophists like Protagoras, was much more practical, democratic, forward-looking, and experimental. Because he found no evidence for such objects, he simply said ideas should be seen as merely useful mental tools for intelligently seeing the future results of each person’s actions here and now, and thus helping people keep improving weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. When our ideas are seen like that, merely as useful future-looking mental tools, then if an idea doesn’t help achieve a goal, another one should be experimented with and tested. If, for example, one idea of a particular stone doesn’t help us build better statues, then we should try another idea.
Also, liberals like Protagoras said the best kind of knowledge requires more than thinking and reasoning about ideas. For liberals like him and Dr. Hippocrates, ideas needed to be actively tested for their reliable and useful results, not once but each time they're used! Only in that way will students learn more healthful actions and help build a more satisfying public good. In short, such liberals emphasized a more active model of learning, where ideas were seen as useful tools, not reflections of absolute truth.
By 1900 Dewey too realized ancient liberals like Protagoras had a much better definition of ideas in an always changing nature. How can anyone know anything for certain in such a world? So, for him too, ideas are not the doorway to already existing truth, either religious or scientific, but are rather best seen as mental tools useful for building better habits here and now. Like nails help build buildings, ideas help build useful habit-arts. After all, the entire modern scientific movement had been actively using and testing ideas as learning tools for about 300 years, and had built our strongest and most reliable kinds of knowledge. They didn’t produce absolute certainty, but they produced some highly reliable and useful ideas, like atoms and evolution.
Is All Learning Experimental?
Thus, with that liberal definition of ideas, the entire conservative model of education could be criticized and challenged. Not only does a liberal definition of ideas help produce the most flexible habits for living intelligently in an always changing world, but it also helps students see how their own ideas are experimental.
The conservative definition of ideas justifies merely passively learning more and more ideas, rather than intelligently improving ones own habits. But more importantly, it also makes it easier to see all learning is experimental, both liberal and conservative! After all, even conservatives like Socrates and Plato used an experimental learning model to test their own ideas, even though they believed their ideas reflected unchanging kinds of truth! The early Platonic dialogues, for example, called the Socratic dialogues, are full of examples of Socrates talking to people and testing their ideas experimentally to see their results, and to see if there were any contradictions in them! If there were, then they really couldn’t be reflections of eternal and unchanging Truth! And, what’s more, many other dialogues also show Plato himself experimenting with new ideas when he discovered serious problems with those he thought were accurate and reliable!
Those were, no doubt, serious weaknesses in the ancient conservative model of ideas. Even great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle realized many of their ideas produced some serious weaknesses and problems. However, their basic faith in their definition of ideas as reflecting nature’s eternal Truth, discovered with reason alone, prevented them from accepting a more liberal definition of ideas. It even carried over into early modern scientific thinking.
At first, with Isaac Newton’s work, many conservatives and moderates believed their scientific ideas reflected unchanging laws of nature, and so once again reasoning and book-learning regained some of its energy after 1600. Many of them felt scientific ideas accurately reflected nature’s eternal Truth, and so students should be made to learn, memorize them, and become more educated people. In fact, such a conservative education model continues to this day in many nations around the world. In them students should merely learn more and more book-ideas already known. Thus, such schools merely replaced medieval religious teachings with scientific book-facts and ideas about eternal natural laws, again helping justify student obedience and a passive book-centered educational model. Merely passively reading and memorizing such ideas was all anyone needed to become a truly educated person! And for the wealthy ruling elite, it also meant having millions of people ready to obey their leaders and keep fighting war, after war, after war. After all, it's what they wanted; many made huge fortunes during those wars.
For progressive liberals like Dewey, however, such a definition of ideas as revealing already-existing eternal Truth was a great educational weakness in our public schools. It made building democratic habits of intelligent choice more difficult, and so as weapons became more destructive, life itself became more dangerous! Besides, if the conservative definition of ideas was best, then why did scientists reject it and use a liberal definition of ideas? Why did, say, Darwin need to use a different idea about species than the one Aristotle used, as something eternal and unchanging?
So, again, the question becomes: How can any idea, even scientific ‘laws’ become absolute Truth in an always changing world? Shouldn’t we be more honest and genuine with ourselves and admit any idea might become wrong and in need of improvement? And if so, then why believe any idea accurately reflects unchanging truth? What's more, not only does a conservative definition of ideas help justify intolerant actions against all those who use their ideas differently, but it also tends to deaden the creative impulse to use ideas for building new and better objects.
Luckily, both those important weaknesses dissolve when ideas are defined liberally, as merely mental tools for making life and nature better than before! That definition helps us act more tolerantly of different kinds of habits, as well as promote more creative kinds of thinking and testing. In effect, then, a liberal definition of ideas as mental tools gives us more control and power in our always changing nature, and encourages us to become better at changing our actions when the situation calls for it. After all, how many billions of taxpayer dollars have scientists wasted on building faulty space robots with nature’s laws of science? Thus, people now have 2 basically different definitions of ideas with which to build very different education models, but Dewey’s liberal one seems to produce better results than the conservative one, and thus deserves more respect.
For example, beginning in 1600, three centuries of intelligent experimental testing helped justify Dewey’s liberal definition of ideas as mental tools. All one needed look at was the growth of modern scientific ‘truth’ itself. Since then, old ideas were often discarded and new ones used to better reflect new knowledge and new facts; the history of atoms is merely one such idea, as was the idea of the earth being at the center of the universe! Albert Einstein’s ideas improved on Newton’s supposedly eternal truth, and then quantum mechanics ideas improved on Einstein’s!
And so, an important new educational challenge began growing for liberals: Why keep building conservative schools based on passively learning more and more ideas, rather than more active and experimental liberal schools, where ideas are best seen as merely tools for building a more satisfying world, and more intelligent habit-arts? Thus, an important educational choice can be made. Should students be made to keep believing book-based ideas are really the best things to know, or should students become freer to start using ideas experimentally and keep improving both themselves and their neighborhoods? After, liberals like Dewey remind us no one can know even a small portion of reliable ideas, so why even try?
For us Deweyan liberals the choice is clear. The best use of ideas is for teaching students how to intelligently use them, rather than just keep learning more and more of them. After all, the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, based on intelligent experimentation, has helped change life in thousands of new ways, so, the more conservative schools ignore teaching the creative use of ideas, the more psychically retarded and weak students remain. As mentioned earlier, even conservative Plato’s writings proved how he treated ideas experimentally. The more he himself asked what must nature's eternal and unchanging Spirit-Ideas be like, the more he had to experimentally test different ideas. And the more that happened, the more convinced he became of his own ignorance about what they were really like! The best he could do with such ideas was to create mythical and poetic stories, some about life after death; they couldn't be proved logically, but they could still be useful if people merely passively accepted them, even without any proof or evidence. Thus he earned his reputation as history’s first Christian more than 300 years before Jesus was born. To us liberals today, however, Plato's writings about such ideas are more poetry than philosophy. For us, all philosophic assumptions need to have some evidence for them.
Using Ideas for Social Excellence
Once the definition of ideas as useful mental tools is accepted, then a host of important liberal results can start growing stronger. For example, it not only helps keep character habits growing, but also question-asking and curiosity as well. If ideas are useful tools for improving anything, then questions about how something can be improved become much more important, as does curiosity. What will happen if one idea is tried instead of another? So, those 2 actions help make learning itself an on-going daily adventure, rather than a boring chore.
In effect, then, feeling ideas are mental tools helps liberate students from merely passively accepting all their old feudalistic political, economic, and educational ideas as the best truth. What's more, a liberal definition of ideas as tools helps energize both democratic thinking and acting, as well as helps students see feudalistic ideas of eternal truth are simply more forms of human art, nothing more and nothing less! Like any idea, their value lies in the results they actually help produce, and the more democratic the results, the better. No doubt, some conservative educational ideas produce results, but in general they’ve been habits of obedience and acceptance. Thus, it's been relatively easy for them to keep feudalistic institutions in place, even today. Our more liberal definition of ideas, however, continues challenging all such uses; in effect they weaken all intelligent democratic habits.
Today, more and more people are realizing all ideas are merely mental tools. But for us liberals, if they don’t help build more democratic power-sharing institutions, like public schools, then they need to be changed and tested for those results. For example, one of the more recent political ideas helping support the status quo in the US was communism; many in the ruling elite needed to convince people it was an evil idea; conservatives especially wanted no talk of sharing any of their economic or political power with workers, so they joined together and demonized the idea. One result was the famous Cold War, where the people were told we need more atomic weapons as well as wars like Vietnam so communist ideas wouldn't keep spreading. So, tax money went from workers to those few building more and more weapons, many of which sit rusting in the ground today.
And more recently, the economic idea of low taxes for the wealthy was said to help produce what many people wanted, more jobs. The recent economic results of the low-tax idea for the wealthy, however, is helping more people see we need to test a different idea to help make life more satisfying, rewarding, and safer for everyone, not just a wealthy few! In such examples it's easy to see how ideas are often used as propaganda tools, rather than reflections of eternal truth, either economic or political.
No doubt, some conservatives may now be feeling how really dangerous a liberal definition of ideas can be to all those who want to keep our society as feudalistic as possible! There’s no economic law saying wealthy folks will automatically keep creating more jobs, or that communists are really evil people; if there were corporations wouldn't be building factories in Vietnam.
By seeing ideas as tools for actually producing better social results, like more equal rights, it becomes easier to keep challenging the entire conservative status quo of concentrated political, economic, and educational power. In reality, treating ideas as merely another form of persuasive art helps build more flexible and fluid personal habits of excellence, especially those which help produce more open and democratic institutions. In any case, however, what matters most are the results any idea helps produce. Conservative educational ideas are used mostly to promote and justify our basically feudalistic status quo, while liberal ideas like democracy and equal rights aim at building a more equal society for all.
Using ideas in our public schools as experimental tools to keep making life more democratic in effect empowers students to become active and forceful learners, rather than passive and accepting people. Our liberal definition of ideas helps energize all democratic forms of living; why should a small group of people keep wielding power over millions of others? Without seeing ideas like that, as merely mental tools, history teaches us life has been feudalistic for thousands of years! Ancient Aztec priests, for example, used religious ideas to convince people only their rituals could actually prevent all of nature from collapsing into chaos and ruin! As a result, people continued accepting that idea, rather than test it for its actual results! We all know the results when a more militarily advanced civilization came into their lives.
What's also important to realize is this: It’s not just ancient history. Today many conservatives continue using some ideas to justify the wealthy class’s control of our political, economic, and educational institutions. For example, conservative politicians often tell people they must not tax our wealthy class more and more, or build more government programs for the poor. Only the wealthy create the jobs everyone needs and wants, and such programs merely make people lazy workers! Those ideas are often said to reflect economic cause-and-effect truth, when, in reality, they're merely useful tools for persuading people to allow more wealth flowing to that small upper class, as well as restricting government help for the poor. Recently we’ve seen how around 90% of profits have gone to wealthy folks, and spending for some useful government programs like Head Start have been reduced! And so by looking at the actual results of such conservative ideas, it becomes easy for us liberals to ask, if wealthy folks really create jobs, then why did the Great Depression last about 10 years? Were wealthy people on vacation all that time? And of course the same question can be asked of our current high unemployment rate too! The wealthy have never been wealthier, and yet millions remain unemployed.
Using Ideas for Personal Excellence
Equally important to public school students is using idea-tools to keep improving their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits with useful social work! If, say, students want to improve their weak reading habits, then each one can start thinking of ways that might happen, and then start testing them. Some may want to read to senior citizens, while others may want to just work by themselves. In any case, however, a liberal definition of ideas as mental tools helps students better guide their own growth and learning! Will they learn to read better if they listen to music, or exercise, or just practice reading aloud and then listening to how they sound? For us Deweyan liberals such a democratic use of ideas as experimental tools best produces useful kinds of body-mind health; it empowers students to keep learning what they want to learn. For us, all students should keep learning how their own body-minds work best, and for that result seeing ideas as helpful tools is most useful. That definition empowers students to keep intelligently learning all through life; is there any greater educational gift to the next generation than that?
As Renee Baron reminds us in her book What Type Am I?, there are a number of useful personal ideas even young students can start learning about when they see ideas as useful learning tools. They’re ideas like perfectionist, helper, achiever, romantic, observer, questioner, adventurer, asserter, and peacemaker. Such ideas can thus help build more intelligent character habits. If so, then why shouldn’t more young children start learning about such ideas and, more importantly, also how to use them as tools to help build forceful, vibrant, and propulsive habit-arts? What's more, in that process students can learn about another important idea: limits! How healthy is it for someone to become an absolute perfectionist about everything, and aren't there healthy limits to the idea of perfection beyond which actions can become an unhealthy and excessive neurosis?
Why shouldn’t even young students start learning about how to use those ideas to become a healthy perfectionist, helper, achiever, romantic, and so on, and thus be better able to live more intelligently throughout life, rather than as an obsessive neurotic? As we saw in the last section, using ideas as mental tools can help build psychological health, rather than unhealthful and excessive psychic neuroses, or worse, psychoses. Considering how many really tragic shootings in schools around the country have been committed by hopelessly excessive neurotics, we liberal Deweyans say it's time we started teaching students some useful ideas about psychic health, rather than useless and disconnected historical, mathematical, and scientific facts. How else can young folks learn to help themselves act healthy all through life unless they learn something about the limits of ordinary idea-tools?
No doubt, health studies aren’t completely neglected in our public schools, but there's more to mental health than merely being told how bad some drugs are, what foods to eat, and to just say no to risky sexual behavior. Without actually being free to actively feel what healthy ‘perfectionist’ and ‘helper’ actions are like, such ideas will soon be forgotten ideas, and not energized into intelligent actions and habits.
An even more basic result becomes more likely when students begin seeing ideas as merely mental tools to help build better habit-arts. They also begin learning how important all their own actions are in life itself! Everyone's actions are their most important learning tools; they are the engines of all meaningful excellence! It's another important result from the idea of active role-playing! Cheating actions, for example, help build a cheating habit; disrespectful actions help build a disrespectful habit, and so on. Actions best build all our intelligent character and mental habits. Intelligent actions help deepen intelligent feelings, and they in turn help deepen all our ideas, even of uniting body and mind into one organic learning process. We don't have a separate mind in a body, but our bodily actions actually build our mental ideas and feelings.
Such results can also help students start feeling another important idea: every day is a kind of learning adventure! What actions will produce the results students want, like learning more about police or lawyer work? Actively using ideas as learning tools thus helps deepen wisdom and knowledge itself! It helps build the feelings for what ideas can mean. Without such actions ideas exist merely on a mental level, disconnected from bodily feelings or energies. Luckily, healthy children are natural energetic dynamos looking to actively experiment with many different roles, so why not start bringing those energies and feelings to a more conscious level of awareness, even in the 1st grade? What kind of ideas do you want to learn more about, helper, questioner, scholar, doctor, experimenter, or what? If nothing else, we liberal Deweyans are very interested in encouraging students to consciously keep expanding their awareness of how ideas can be used as tools to become what they want to become.
Such thinking allows us to see yet another important weakness in the conservative book-centered learning model. Within that model, ideas are not only confined to a mental level of awareness, if learned at all, but for the most part they remain narrow and shallow. So, they’re often quickly forgotten and thus fail to actually build more healthy habit-arts in students. As we saw earlier, conservative schools generally ignore actively teaching excellent character ideas on a formal classroom level with role-playing activities. As a result, most students are coming out of high school with very shallow feelings about some very important ideas, like what it means to act as an intelligent and responsible business person as well as citizen in a democratic republic.
In more liberal schools, however, students are encouraged to actively test even healthy democratic political ideas, so the feelings and habits for those ideas become much stronger and forceful. And they in turn will help make excessive political actions on all levels much more difficult to tolerate. Thus, personal habits are connected to political ideas as well, rather than continue being disconnected and separate. It makes it easier to better control all concentrated feudalistic forms of power still endangering life for millions of people. Given the great power of our wealthy upper class, it's a great challenge, but the more we walk away from it, the stronger it can become!
After such liberal schools are working for a few years, then older students who’ve learned to read and write can even write performing scenes to help younger students actually feel how a healthy ‘perfectionist’ or ‘peacemaker’ act, and thus begin learning how such healthy actions feel. Such feelings are just as important as ideas themselves; they help anchor ideas to one's bodily feelings. No matter how smart a student is, actively using ideas as tools to guide intelligent actions will deepen the meanings of all ideas! It's the basis for the old sayings, actions speak louder than words, and, if you want something done right, then do it yourself! And, needless to say, the more joy students feel about such actions, the better it is. How many adults today have learned to smile and feel joy while they exercise, or during any other activity? Take a look around and you'll see what I mean.
As we saw earlier, learning healthy personal habits like enjoyment, respect, helpfulness, honesty, and creative playfulness can more easily begin growing when such ideas are treated as guidance tools, rather than something everyone should learn for passing the next test, or for winning a better life after death. For us Deweyan liberals, building a better and more democratic world here and now is the best goal, and so intelligent actions are the most important things to learn, not merely how the ideas we read about are the real and unchanging truth. How deep and meaningful can, say, love be when it’s divorced from loving actions? And the same question may be asked of every idea and subject.
With intelligent role-playing skits, students can begin feeling science itself is much more than a bunch of ideas about famous scientists, or history is more than learning more names and dates. With such skits students can begin feeling how science and history are all an organic part of life itself. They're about the ACTIONS people make, and of course the social results they produce. In short, the best personal kinds of education aim to do more than merely teach students to talk about ideas of weak, excessive, and unhealthful actions. They aim to actively sculpt body-mind energies into working and propulsive habit-arts. So, for us liberals, actually feeling the results of healthy role-playing ideas are the best way they're deepened and broadened. For us liberals, the days of a passive and mental kind of education are over; our challenge is to bring more active kinds of learning to our public schools.
Here’s another example from history. As with many ancient peoples, the Greeks too went about building healthy personal eating habits based on the results of their actions, or intuitively so to speak. They intuitively felt the useful results of a low-calorie diet on their energy levels and actions, and so found it easier to turn those feelings into useful idea-tools. Such active kinds of experimenting thus made it easier to keep building useful trading colonies all over the Mediterranean region. Eventually such ideas were simplified into the famous Greek saying of moderation in all things one does. Aristotle later made that idea one of the most important ethical idea-tools; it became known as the golden mean. In short, their diet ideas, based on active experimentation, were used as helpful mental tools to keep expanding their knowledge and mental horizons; they sent Greek men and women all over the Mediterranean and Black Sea to build colonies to trade with less civilized peoples. Thus they built the confidence to keep actively learning more feelings and ideas -- another important sign of mental health. They learned to promote body-mind health by normally eating very light breakfasts and lunches, very little animal meat, and eating a more caloric dinner with, perhaps, a little fish and veggies. As a result, their mental energies were liberated rather than blocked up; they actively used the idea of moderation as a tool to keep building more useful habits. They thus had the energy to better learn about new challenges and build new habits, like intelligent question-asking, logical talking, testing, creative thinking, and much more. No doubt, not everyone became a Democritus or Plato, but enough kept building the foundational model of Western civilization, with its liberal, moderate, and conservative models.
Greeks intuitively felt the organic connection between diet, exercise and body-mind health largely because they actively experimented with those ideas, just as the Bible tells us Jews experimented with their diet-habits too. They didn't need university professors telling them what their own actions told them. Greeks FELT in their daily lives how active exercise, if done in moderation, helped release annoying muscular tension and discomfort, relax the body-mind, and help refresh their attention and thinking, often about philosophic ideas and how they should be best used. Playfully enjoying physical exercise in their public gymnasia was a regular part of daily life, for both young and adult males. And, in those conversations, the very important art of philosophic talking and reasoning was born, an art too often neglected today, largely because it’s been neglected in our public schools, and taken over by professional scholars who’ve built their own philosophic language and definitions. As a result, basic philosophic question-asking and logical thinking has become much rarer in society as well as ignored in our public schools. Why shouldn't students begin asking such basic questions: what is nature; how can we best learn what we want; and what is social excellence in a democratic society? It's basically the habit-art of using ideas as tools to keep looking for more useful answers to those kinds of questions. And so it’s been left to popular writers like myself to re-connect the public to that art, so our own personal habits and social institutions don't keep preventing more intelligent habits and institutions from evolving, so life can keep changing for everyone in our always-changing world.
Meanwhile, Back In School
To us Deweyan liberals, ideas are thus not the doorway to eternal kinds of knowledge, like some religions and most philosophies teach. Ideas aren't reflections of unchanging objects useful for ending a growing and learning process, but rather tools useful to keep learning throughout life. And so what better time to start teaching the next generation how to keep using their ideas constructively than in our public elementary schools? Why should they feel their ideas and actions really can’t be used to help make real improvements in life? Building those kinds of habits merely makes it easier for the wealthy and powerful to keep becoming even wealthier and more powerful.
Really now, is there a more intelligent way to keep children from hanging out on street corners helping deal drugs than empowering them with much more intelligent ideas and habit-arts? Already in many countries, and in our own inner cities and suburbs, heroin drug dealing continues ruining lives before they have a chance to begin making important contributions to life. If so, then shouldn't our own public schools teach students how to use ideas as tools? Only about 30% of students go on to some college after high school, so why not begin empowering all students with some intelligent ideas and habits?
How many overweight young folks, for example, don't feel attractive and lovable, and thus have low self-esteem? Without giving them the freedom to choose what to learn, and not teaching them how ideas can be used as tools, our own public schools all but condemn them to such feelings. Rather than becoming part of the solution, our own schools remain part of the problem! But by simply teaching students how to use ideas constructively, they'll become much better at bringing their own subconscious feelings to a conscious level of awareness, when they’re more easily used as experimental tools to build better personal habits. The alternative is to continue feeling fate or god's will has determined them to be the way they are, and that has been what conservatives have wanted people to feel for thousands of years! Such ideas help make people more manageable and controllable.
No doubt, at first some students who haven’t been allowed to dream about what they want to become will seemingly waste their time in such liberal schools, and not have a direction and goal for their actions. What else is new? Even when adults suddenly find themselves with more freedom, they often keep practicing their old habits, and thus might miss some new opportunities. It often takes some time for such people to look around, see what’s available, and feel the ideas they want most to learn more about. What else is mental health but having the freedom to see intelligent possibilities, and then start intelligently working to make them real and active? So, again, it should be asked: why shouldn't even 1st grade students being feeling such kinds of freedom, make a choice for themselves, and then begin learning how to use ideas as tools and guides to make their dreams come true? No doubt, some students will change their goals, just as many adults change their goals, but whatever the goal, using ideas as tools will be useful. It’s yet another benefit from Dewey's philosophic art of abstract thinking.
Idea-Tools Help Us Predict Future Results
Say, for instance, some 4th grade students set the healthy goal of learning to run a mile in ten minutes. Then, as we saw earlier, using ideas as tools for building an intelligent plan for actively pursuing their goal, with some ideas of daily practice, would also help them feel the intelligent ‘baby-step’ approach to achieving any goal whatsoever! It’s summed up with the saying, inch by inch life’s a cinch. With the help of a teacher or student assistant they could first use some ideas as tools for writing an experimental plan of attack, and perhaps even work with a partner to help time each other. With their idea-tools they could describe how they would gradually keep increasing the running distance for their goal, and then actively test it to see if they could achieve it. If not, they could build a more realistic plan with different ideas.
In any case, however, they would begin feeling how ideas should be used as tools, rather than as signs of knowing eternal and unchanging kinds of truth, whether they’re mathematical, historical, or scientific. How many students even today still feel scientific ideas reveal nature's unchanging laws, rather than as experimental tools helping us learn how to achieving what we want? Such ideas are useful almost all the time, but there are situations in which even they don't produce the results wanted. Other events might work to stop them.
With such ideas students can thus begin feeling the need to discover those ideas with predictive power! What future results will be best produced with what ideas? That question alone opens up the entire universe of creative predicting, and more importantly, it also starts building the tremendously important feeling for FUTURE RESULTS as the best objects of knowledge, rather than looking to the past for what others said was the Truth. That kind of predictive power thus begins focusing student attention onto achieving better future results, rather than merely accepting the status quo. Such accepting in an always changing world merely keeps endangering more and more people.
Also, in that kind of predictive process, they would also begin building useful feelings about their own strengths and weaknesses, and what they can and can’t predict will happen. Is there any better way to build such realistic feelings and ideas into young body-minds? If so, then another useful art is making such work as enjoyable and pain-free as possible; 'no pain, no gain' is the exercise ethic of masochists, not intelligent people! For most people pain is a sign they're doing something wrong, or something wrong is happening.
Using ideas as tools in an encouraging and positive atmosphere makes it easier for students to not only learn more about their own limits, but also how to intelligently predict how long achieving a goal will take, and how much work will be needed each day. How enjoyable was walking 4 laps how long did it take, and how accurate were our predictions? Then, what will it be like to run one lap and walk 3 laps? Using ideas that way can help students fell all actions as experimental, vibrant, fluid, predictive, and energetic, rather than merely vegetative, boring, and book-anchored.
Obviously not only would using ideas that way help strengthen their body-minds slowly for living in an always changing world, and even perhaps more enjoyably, but it would also help students begin feeling how to intelligently direct the growth of their own energies and power; in that process they would also gain more real confidence for achieving goals they want. What else is educational excellence except making everyone their own best teacher?
They can also begin feeling how their ideas and words can communicate their feelings with others, as well as building more respect for what others are learning too. In that way they can learn who’s having trouble, who needs more encouragement, and thus build their democratic helping habit-arts as well. Even useful math ideas can begin growing when they’re used to, say, make graphs to show their improvement for learning a new habit-art, like running a mile in under 10 minutes. All such useful results can begin deepening student feelings about intelligence, confidence, and independent learning and creative problem solving -- body-mind health itself! Tom Edison’s mother taught him that creative kind of art, and he soon went out on his own while still in his teens.
Again, the ideas of choice, as well as actively playing and enjoying using idea-tools, are important for body-mind health. What woman doesn't like to have a choice about which man to marry? And what person wouldn't become a more intelligent learner when using any idea as merely a useful tool to achieve some goal? When used intelligently, ideas help build all those useful habit-arts? So, learning to use ideas as tools becomes another very important learning skill for anyone in a liberal school, home, or church. Even today, it’s still a serious challenge not only for US education, but for schools throughout the world. How many teachers ever talk about habits like feeling joy and playfulness as the result of practicing those idea-tools? For the most part it's open your books and here's the assignment.
So, we Deweyan liberals ask wouldn’t students become more healthful learners if they were free to actively use ideas to build those kinds of feelings? The more students enjoy experimenting to consciously build new skills, a step at a time and a day at a time, the sooner they'll become more confident and curious learners about other skills as well. They'll become more liberated to live well in the always changing world. Even as Plato saw, most people remain psychically chained to their own subconscious cave of routine habits, often feeling that’s the best life can be while waiting for a life after this. And, as our drop-out statistics are telling us today, the less students feel how to use idea-tools intelligently, the easier it is to get bored, frustrated, and too often even destructively violent.
Recently a former Harvard president said we'll never get the schools we need for teaching students the skills they need without private funding. We Deweyan liberals take that to mean for-profit charter schools are the only hope for educational excellence. If so, then respectfully, we progressive liberals say that idea is being used merely as another conservative propaganda tool to keep destroying our public schools and weakening teacher union strength. Ideas leaving only one option are simply assumptions, and thus need to be tested like any other idea. As we've been seeing in these pages, however, people in every neighborhood can come together and start building schools not to teach students to conform and accept the status quo, but to build intelligent democratic habits useful in today's still feudalistic world. So, to us, it makes perfectly good sense to ask: How much longer will it take for tax payers to start learning about a liberal educational model, and then start using their precious tax money for schools where more intelligent habit-arts and skills are taught in all classrooms, as well as homes and liberal churches?
Teaching youngsters how to CONSCIOUSLY FEEL ideas are mental tools useful for achieving any goal is a large part of that liberal system. That creative art, and it is a creative art, is useful throughout life for detecting any form of propaganda, be it secular or religious. Incidentally, that same Harvard president also said the government doesn't need to regulate banks from selling junk mortgages and other highly risky products, and look at the disastrous economic results for millions of that idea-tool!
In more liberal schools educational excellence itself becomes the art of helping students actively feel and build such learning habits right in their own neighborhoods with active and constructive projects. What more should we ask of our tax payers than helping build such schools? The health of our citizens and our democracy both depend on them.
26. MORE EDUCATION PSYCHOLOGY: FACULTIES
What is a Mental Faculty?
It's basically another idea useful for building conservative schools. This is certainly not the place for a detailed history of psychology, but the faculty idea will help educate liberal and independent parents, students, teachers, and church leaders about how conservatives use their ideas. After all, many people today still believe their neighborhood schools are using the best and most scientific psychological model of learning, so the next generation will be well prepared for life after high school, whether it's in business or college. As we’ve been seeing, however, that assumption should no longer be defended by liberals and independents. True, more modern experimental ideas of testing are now widely used in our public school system. But, they're basically used in a very narrow way, namely to see if students actually learned what book-facts the teacher has taught. Thus liberal Deweyans and independents can still confidently criticize our conservative public schools when they use a faculty model of learning to justify teaching more and more book facts! Our new experimental psychological model has turned to be a much more powerful learning tool than the idea of mental faculties.
Some educators even today might say that a book-based learning model is best for developing innate student faculties, and it's the best way such faculties can be developed. But with the growth of experimental Behavioral psychology, where children actively learn on a daily basis to intelligently guide their own growth with rewards, we Deweyan liberals can continue criticizing a faculty model of learning, and its dependence on book-facts. Why? Well, the personal and social results of a faculty model continue supporting our liberal criticisms. No doubt, a faculty model of learning has been used by ruling elites for thousands of years, but mere use doesn't mean it's the best model for building intelligent democratic habit-arts. In fact, for us Deweyan liberals it's become a major obstacle for building those modern kinds of habits. As we've been seeing for many pages now, a kind of conservative feudalistic behavioral cancer continues producing undemocratic institutions run by a few people who remain greedy for power, whether it's religious, economic, military, or educational.
Some History
Like most other conservative ideas, faculty psychology can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Both were very interested in proving some people could learn eternal and unchanging kinds of facts and Truth, and thus be trusted with political power; even for Aristotle an enlightened despot was the best form of government; he certainly wasn't a democrat. In fact, both worked to build a faculty model of the human psyche, where only a few people have the ability to learn such Truth.
In the last section we looked at 2 basically different definitions of ideas, conservative and liberal. In this section, then, we’ll see how learning itself was then pictured by conservative and liberal philosophers. Even for moderates like Aristotle, the key idea was faculty. Each of us has a set of more or less separate faculties allowing us to know certain meanings. A memory faculty, for example, allowed us to learn historical facts, therefore history should be a separate subject. A reasoning faculty allowed us to use facts to reason and learn more knowledge from them, and so logic became a separate subject. What's more, like his teacher Plato, he too suggested a reasoning faculty was eternal, although the debate over what he really meant has been on-going for thousands of years. Then, an intuitive faculty can help us see the logical certainties forming the starting point for any subject, from mathematics to history to biology. For example, our intuitive faculty reasoning with math facts helps us see another one of its certain truths: equal quantities added to equal quantities produce equal quantities. Thus, with such assumed certainties mathematics itself becomes a certain science. For liberals, however, such certainties are merely the result of using ideas in a certain way, and tell us nothing about how nature actually works.
The idea of mental faculties was also educationally useful; after all, both Plato and Aristotle ran schools teaching students they could learn absolutely certain knowledge. Plato was interested in mathematical kinds of certainty, while Aristotle sought biological kinds of certainty. Thus schools after them continued growing in Western civilization; after all, teachers wanted to justify their fees by teaching useful knowledge and skills. However, without today's liberal experimental model of psychology, where all ideas should be tested for their reliability with each use, it was easy to keep telling students the knowledge they were being given was absolutely certain and were thus the best facts to know. And, of course, with Christianity's growth, the idea of a spiritual faculty or soul was used to make people feel Christian ideas were certain and absolutely True; they too depended on people accepting their ideas.
Thus, a more active and power-sharing experimental testing model, and designed to build power-sharing political, economic, and educational habits, continued being almost completely neglected and even violently fought against! Burning dissenters at the stake eventually became merely one form of it. Rulers and Church leaders wanted, more than anything else, to maintain their feudalistic power, and so they needed loyal and obedient followers. Thus a faculty model of psychology stayed in use. Who would dare disagree with those who possess absolute Truth and the means to a perfect eternal life after death? Only those possessed by the devil, no doubt.
In fact, even today many educators who don’t want to rock any conservative educational boats will say a faculty model of learning is still best. More often than not they help defend a conservative educational system where book facts remain the stock in trade, so naturally they want to keep it and their jobs in place. After all, such a system has been in place for thousands of years, so why try to change it?
No doubt, both conservative Plato and liberal Protagoras felt the importance of psychological ideas, but by using different assumptions about the human psyche they naturally built very different learning models of it. Thus, Plato's faculty model helped produce undemocratic and obedient habits, while Protagoras's model encouraged habits of democratic equality and individual freedom. His lectures taught young Greek men how to defend themselves in any kind of verbal argument.
At his school in Athens, conservative Plato helped a few young men and women feel they could learn nature’s highest Spirit-Truths by using their contemplative reasoning spirit-faculty alone. For him everyone has an eternal spirit-part of their psyche, but at birth it becomes wrapped with other material objects, and thus it's up to each student to peel away those distractions and once again know nature's eternal Truths. So, that psyche is already packed with many eternal and unchanging spirit-ideas, however, only a few smart people are able to spend years neglecting sense-based knowledge and get to know eternal Idea-Truths. And so his faculty model of the human psyche was more a product of philosophic art than anything else. He knew what he wanted to learn about, and so built a faculty model of learning to produce such knowledge. It allowed people to believe unchanging objects of knowledge existed, the reasoning faculty lived on after death, and it contained all the reasoning powers of the person.
However, in the absence of any objective evidence, it can be seen today as merely more philosophic art than anything else. His aim all through life was to defeat democrats like Protagoras who denied any knowledge of such objects, and thus justify his feudalistic political ideas. He thus created his conservative psychological model of 3 faculties in which everyone is divided into a physical body with 2 natural faculties, and a reasoning spirit-faculty. As we saw earlier, however, exactly how the 2 could ever interact has remained the major philosophic problem for conservative thinkers to this day.
Plato also named 2 other natural faculties, a reproductive faculty, and an aggressive or spirited faculty. For him they learned facts about pleasure, food, and sexual meanings, and so perished after death. The reasoning faculty, however, lived on, or so he hoped and assumed all through his life. For him, then the reasoning faculty was a completely different faculty, and for thousands of years religious conservatives like him accepted pretty much the same faculty model. In fact, both Plato and Aristotle needed such a psychology or else their entire war against liberal thinkers like Democritus and Protagoras would be hopelessly lost! Greek society in general promoted all kinds of contests, even philosophic ones, rather than today where experimental testing has become the best way to settle all such philosophic disputes. In that experimental model everyone learns only what they practice! As a result, today philosophy has become largely another way to sharpen one's reading and debate habits, helping prepare students for law school.
Later on, Christian philosophers like Augustine added more faculties to a person’s immortal soul. For them it somehow inherited an original sin from Adam and Eve, and thus needed the faculty of faith to receive god's grace so it could partake in a perfect heavenly life after death, and for all eternity. Needless to say, such ideas were welcomed by almost everyone whose lives were poor, short, and disease infected. In any case, only a few blessed Christians could use their faculty of faith and god's grace to accept nature’s highest truths, while bodily faculties kept preventing people from receiving god's grace.
But again, for Dewey and millions of other liberals and independents today, such a faculty model of psychology wasn't based on any kind of objective evidence. It was basically another work of philosophic art, based on the needs of conservatives to help justify undemocratic and feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems! In short, it was more conservative propaganda than reliable truth, and thus, for us liberals, was one of the greatest philosophic mistakes of all time! Effective propaganda it was; philosophic truth it wasn't.
For one thing, it justified discriminating against all those people who were perfectly capable of learning all through life; it merely celebrated those more agile thinkers who had better memories. It also helped keep the masses grossly undereducated and obedient; it taught people naturalistic kinds of knowledge were less than the best kind of religious ideas, and they were what they should be obedient to. And not only that, but for centuries it also helped justify a feudalistic political and economic system, run from the top down by a small unelected elite. Sure, once in a while peasants rebelled, but they were soon put down by force of arms; above all else, concentrated forms of power must be protected.
In fact, the totalitarian and feudalistic systems we still see today, on the communist left, the fascist right, and in the wealth-dominated US, are direct descendants of those ideas and that medieval world. Today many wealthy folks in the US still feel they're somehow exceptional and should be treated differently from everyone else. And even though Karl Marx ended up saying the workers will eventually gain ruling power over wealthy factory owners, around the world today it remains merely another idea, even in Russia and China. Even in China teenagers are almost forced to work long hours every day for pennies a day, and of course in their conservative book-centered schools students must obey those in authority. In fact, there's some supreme irony here. Almost no one today realizes even Plato himself failed to understand with his reasoning faculty what Spirit-Ideas meant, or how they actually worked! Later on, Christians like Augustine simply added the idea of faith as a necessary learning faculty, making it easier for people to passively accept the Church's ideas. For example, how can god know everything and yet humans still have free will? Augustine advised followers to merely accept both ideas with faith. Followers were also told god had graced Church leaders by revealing to them his eternal and unchanging Truth and they should merely accept them.
A Modern Model of Faculties
After 1600, however, things started changing for the better. Western civilization began growing more and more secular with the help of experimental science, sea explorations, and the Protestant Reformation! Eventually science's testing art of ideas would help build a more scientific psychological model, based on habits and impulses, rather than any kinds of learning faculties. Such a experimental model began competing Aristotle’s faculty learning model. Soon, however, modern scholars would make all faculties naturalistic, rather than saying some were spirit-faculties. After all, the older he got, the less spirit-minded Aristotle himself became.
However, because most schools aren't using an experimental model of learning, today millions of students around the world are still anchored to their book-based systems of learning with a faculty psychology. And what's more, they continue building habits of obedience so students continue accepting their feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems! All, or nearly all, subjects can be learned merely with a reasoning faculty, merely by reading and answering some questions. Experimental learning is still such a new learning tool, most people keep subconsciously accepting that faculty learning model even though there isn't any objective evidence for it, as we’ll see in Section 28.
Thus, as the modern secular world continues unfolding, spirit-ideas are becoming less important, but the basic faculty model of learning remains in place. Since the 1700s faculties were simply seen as natural abilities most everyone has and book knowledge helps develop. After all, the system of teaching such facts had been in place for thousands of years, so why bother trying to change it? Why indeed? It's mainly because feudalistic systems of power keep making life much more unequal, unstable, and dangerous than democratic systems based on equal rights. Just look again at the recent disastrous social results of the US feudalistic economy run largely by a few large wealthy banks and a small conservative wing of our 3,000,000 strong upper class.
As recently as the 1700s, ideas about faculties still had a certain widespread intellectual respectability! Even respected skeptic philosophers like David Hume (d. 1776) had talked about innate and inborn human faculties maturing at different times and with the help of only certain subjects. The result was philosophy's famous Atomistic model of psychology. History, for example, developed the memory faculty. Upon such psychological assumptions Hume even pictured himself as the Newton of psychology, where he too discovered nature's eternal psychological truth.
Thus, for early modern conservative educators, learning should continue aiming at developing immature ready-made psychic faculties merely with the help of reading book-facts and knowledge about different subjects. They merely assumed school should train students to become adults, rather than treat them as individuals with their own wants and needs. Mathematics developed the reasoning faculty, so all students should study math. In reality, however, it helped justify taking more money from college students to learn more academic facts they would rarely, if ever, use even teaching in high school or middle school classrooms, much less in real life. Faculty psychology also justify the college system of making students major in one subject area, and thus keep professors busy teaching more and more academic facts.
However, all results weren't negative. A faculty model of learning also helped broaden the subject itself in the 1700s. For example, secular thinkers in France asked are there stages of faculty development, and if so what are they? Also, are there single subjects that best develop a student’s faculties, and if so what are they? And of course many wanted to know exactly how many faculties people have. Are there just a few or many? Are people all born with some innate faculties, like intelligence, or can intelligence be learned by most everyone, like any other habit-art? And if so, what’s the best way to teach it? Thus, from the 1700s, educational psychology became a fundamentally important study, especially for secular liberal thinkers; one of its early thinkers was Jean Rousseau. Eventually, the result would be the creation of an experimental learning model. Eventually, in the late 1800s, a much more scientific Behavioral learning model began emerging, where, for Dewey, habits and native impulses became the basic elements of the human psyche. In German and American psyche labs people like William James actually studied how animals best learn any habit with the help of rewards and encouragement. James’ work greatly influenced Dewey’s interest in psychology.
So, as our more scientific world continued emerging, more and more psychologists became skeptical of a faculty learning model, Dewey being one of them. In general, it was often used by undemocratic conservatives to keep students basically passive, uninformed about what was happening right in their own neighborhoods, and thus unable to make any intelligent improvements in their neighborhoods. With it students thus remained basically passive and isolated from learning about the adult world around them. The recent financial debacle in Detroit, where disconnected voters allowed politicians and labor unions to run up an $18 billion public debt, is merely another example of how dangerous life can become when student heads are kept buried in their text books!
What a shame more students aren't taught more economics with active and experimental role-playing activities, and thus learn how wealthy people actually keep working to concentrate their power and thus make life more dangerous than necessary. After all, whatever happens economically, they become richer! So today, it's now become much easier to see the US Constitution of 1789 as basically a free-trade agreement between 13 separate and distinct colonies, thus making it easier for wealthy folks to keep growing wealthier. Before it was written each colony could print its own money and act basically as an independent nation, honor the contracts it wanted, and thus make inter-colony business almost impossible to conduct. So a small group of wealthy plantation farmers like George Washington, and businessmen like Alexander Hamilton met in Philadelphia in 1789 and in secret negotiations hammered out a much more business-friendly constitution. It gave the federal government the power to tax all people to pay off government bonds wealthy folks had bought to finance the revolution of 1776, and endorse all contracts too. Only after the document was written did democrats like Tom Jefferson demand a Bill of Rights be added to it, only to see such rights as free speech weakened a few years later by the Sedition Act. In effect then, the British ruling elite were replaced by an American ruling elite. And so, as students were kept distracted and uninformed about real life by learning more and more book facts in public schools, the United States government was launched. Even Franklin knew its ideas were just another experiment, rather than seeing the document as establishing eternal principles of good government, like many conservatives still do today. When someone asked him what the framers came up with, Franklin said a federal government, if you can hold it.
Obviously, the more a conservative faculty model of learning is accepted as the best, the more difficult it becomes to learn more useful democratic habits, as well as learn important and intelligent character habits! After all, the system is already in place, so why try any kind of improvement? However, as we’ve been seeing more and more these days, such educational ideas are turning out to be more propaganda than anything else. Our public schools continue teaching generally useless and soon forgotten book-facts to the next generation, rather than what character habits are excellent in a democratic republic, and how best to actively build them, so they can become productive members in their own neighborhoods! Dewey's more experimental learning model celebrates those kinds of habits, and actively testing ideas with an organic and interconnected body-mind. With that kind of active learning model in every learning process, all ideas and their meanings become more deeply felt!
As we’ll see in Section 28, there’s absolutely no objective proof only math studies teach students how to reason better and more intelligently. And if so, then how can any separate subject be justified in our public schools for 12 years? For many liberals today, it's justified by better helping feed students into our book-centered colleges, where different subjects have their own departments. They need to have teaching opportunities for those majoring in their subject, so they too endorse a book-centered public school system based on a faculty model of learning. However, we continue seeing the results today in millions of such psychically disconnected people not caring about economic and political actions their own taxes are helping support! For us, that's exactly the kind of voters conservatives want! The less people know or care about what's going on in their own communities and nation, the easier it is for wealthy folks to keep making politicians do their bidding to keep increasing their power, as well as keep students from learning important job skills they can use right after high school. Universities want their students to merely keep learning more book-facts.
With an experimental model of learning, however, that entire conservative public school system can be challenged by everyone who wants a better educated society. With that psychological model each student is free to build their own habits of job skill excellence, making learning a much more organic and interrelated process, and also build habits for increasing their democratic freedoms and equal rights. As Dewey said, an actively experimental learning model is and can be our only learning model in an always changing world. For example, how shallow would one’s sexual knowledge, or any knowledge, be without experimental practice? The more we experimentally test any idea, the deeper we feel its meanings and results, making all ideas stronger. Is there any other reason why Viagra is so popular around the world – viva experience?
For us liberals, then, all bodily experience creates feelings, and only they give any kind of depth and meaning to any idea we may learn! The faculty model of learning keeps such feelings weak and immature. Thus, the educational challenge remains for all liberals and independents to keep building public schools where active forms of learning are practiced daily! The more students practice intelligent kinds of testing, the more they learn better English, math, science, and sociological facts! Are such schools really impossible to build? Are they? Think about this for a moment. All the social improvements we now have, like cell phones and the internet, were, at one time, felt by many to be impossible; old habits kept making the status quo feel good, true, and right. Even Ben Franklin's lightning rod in the mid-1700s produced alarming feelings in conservative people. Believe it or not, many religious conservatives actually felt the invention diminished god's power to punish wicked sinners. What kind of an all-powerful and perfectly good god could even create such sinners?
More Psych History
In the 1700s, as faculties became more naturalistic and less spirit-oriented, they gained a certain intellectual respectability for the growing secular Enlightenment thinkers. Even skeptic philosopher David Hume even pictured himself as the Newton of psychology, and uncovering more eternal laws of science. In fact, however, his faculty ideas too endorsed a conservative model of book-centered learning. Educators should keep aiming at developing immature ready-made psychic faculties merely with the help of more book-facts and knowledge. In reality, however, it merely justified the university system already in place. After all, colleges wanted paying customers for 4 years rather than for 1, 2, or 3 years!
In the late 1800s liberal German and American psychologists like Dewey helped build Behavioral labs to actually test different learning ideas, like faculties, to discover how reliable they were. Eventually the question became, did faculties really exist, and if not, then what would more liberal schools look like? If an experimental model of psychology was the most reliable one, then how should we be building our public school system to give everyone a chance to better work and produce in a democratic republic, and also feel the need for equal rights and freedoms? After all, if such faculties existed, then why is there so much variety of habits around the world? Under what faculty was head-hunting learned?
Thus the idea of habits and rewards became more important in teaching, as the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov was learning in the early 1900s. He found he could teach a dog to salivate when it heard a bell by giving the dog a food reward after a bell rang. Clearly, the whole idea of there being faculties for learning continued to be questioned as the 1900s opened up. If satisfying rewards were really the key to learning, then it didn’t matter what one studied or what faculty one used; one learned fastest what one was rewarded most for doing. Thus, in public schools, grades, promotions to the next grade, and graduation ceremonies became important parts of the system. Such learning rewards helped condition young folks to feel they were really getting the best kind of education possible.
The new experimental psychology also spread into the business community and its advertising. People were told they could get something for free if they first bought something. And of course, in gambling casinos the idea of rewards was used to keep training people to keep putting money in, say, slot machines. A few coins returned for their work every now and then kept people pulling those levers and feeding the machines, just like pigeons kept pressing a level to get more food once in a while! Today, such businesses are one of the most lucrative money-making machines there are, and of course paying out a large reward once a year kept conditioning people too.
In any event, however, a serious liberal challenge to a conservative faculty learning model began growing with Dewey’s help in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The challenge for such liberal democrats was to test the idea of organic learning, rather than faculty learning, and in the process of building useful habits also build democratic habits as well. In fact, the whole Progressive Movement in the early 1900s focused on creating more democratic power-sharing political, economic, and educational systems throughout the nation! Once again, however, war and the Great Depression helped divert attention away from building such liberal systems. Both World War 1, the stock market crash of 1929, followed by World War 2 and then the Cold War all helped but stop those growing liberal democratic systems.
Before 1930, Dewey’s experimental model of learning became the philosophic basis for building more liberal public schools, where children would learn more useful health, economic, and business facts in more actively experimental schools. Ben Franklin began sensing the value of experimental learning even before the American Revolution; his famous saying was let the experiment begin! He was only 150 years ahead of his time!
In the late 1890s, at John Rockefeller's newly opened University of Chicago, Dewey’s experimental school would eventually begin testing a more active, organic, and experimental learning model, making school itself much more naturalistic and student-centered. As we’ve already seen, he suggested 3 main stages of childhood mental development, helping make sense-based learning and intelligent construction projects before the teenage years much more important parts of elementary education. Students would be free to build useful projects they wanted to experiment with. And to help them he said schools should also have a number of experimental workshops, rather than classrooms, like metal, wood, clothing, and cooking shops, to intelligently build their constructive habits in early childhood, and thus helping deepen their feelings for more abstract book-studies in high school for those going on to college. It was like the old liberal Greek ideal of harmonizing feelings and ideas -- in short, organically building character and intellect together! However, outside of the university he also began teaching immigrants at Jane Addams’s Hull House more democratic habit-feelings, like organizing labor unions against feudalistic corporate power, what equal rights and freedoms felt like, and how to make politicians work for neighborhood improvements. Such ideas, however, were simply unacceptable to conservative Baptist John Rockefeller who liked to picture himself as chosen by god to become the richest man on earth. Dewey would move on to New York’s more secular Columbia University in 1904.
For Dewey, child development studies at his Chicago lab school began building the more reliable learning model for more democratically experimental schools! In them student habits, rather than innate faculties, were most important, where bodily feeling and mental ideas were united rather than separated and grown merely with more book-facts. Thus, before World War 1, began growing the tension between conservative and liberals schools. Even though some vocational schools were built, the entire public school system was set up for students to continue on to college after high school, even though the majority of students started working even before they graduated.
As a result, in conservative public schools textbooks were simplified to accommodate every grade, so teaching more and more book-facts became easier. As we’ll see in a later section, in spite of it, a liberal progressive education system continued growing across the nation. In many big cities like Denver, Los Angeles, and Gary, Indiana, progressive and practical schools began giving children the skills and knowledge they could use right after graduation. After all, many of them were from poor families and so didn't have the money for a college education. Naturally, many conservatives were against such schools; they wanted their own class members to get such jobs, and so kept working against building more liberal schools. In the height of the Jim Crow era of racial discrimination in 1930, many conservatives wanted as few people as possible to build democratic habits of equality and equal rights. As a result, liberal schools were ignored for the most part in most of the country. Even in many northern cities, conservative white folks were just as bigoted as southern conservatives; many even outlawed interracial marriage. As a result, we live today with such a conservative public school system, built mainly by conservatives as a defense against the growth of more liberal ideas, and in the 1950s often clothed in the rhetoric of fighting godless communism, as if they too didn't want to keep their own feudalistic powerful as concentrated as possible. For conservatives today, liberals ideas of equal rights and intelligent government regulation are seen as the same as devils were seen in the Middle Ages. Both ideas threatened the feudalistic status quo power structure.
How Important Are Feelings?
Today, still not enough parents and students realize feelings are very important in any learning experience, and they are best built with an active experimental learning model. Constructive and enjoyable actions help build constructive and enjoyable feelings. And more enjoyable feelings, in turn, help make learning anything easier and more productive. That whole naturalistic learning process becomes more difficult when learning is artificially restricted to merely reading more and more book-facts. So, the sooner intelligent and enjoyable feelings are encouraged with experimental learning projects in our public schools, the better educated students will become. For Dewey, building such feelings with intelligent and constructive workshops are the basis for all learning excellence.
In Dewey's greatest work Experience and Nature, he noted the importance of feelings in a learning process. They actually reach down into nature, and put us in contact with its always moving and flowing energies! If they weren’t the basis of all learning, life would have died out billions of years ago. In short, if you think feelings are just inside your own head, it's another sign of how disconnected you've become from your body and its connection to all forms of learning! Feelings are the common factor in all living creatures, and are the result of actions within nature, not apart from it! Thus, the more students are restricted with book-work from feeling those kinds of energies on their own school grounds and within their own neighborhoods, the more disconnected they remain from life itself. In fact, such a disconnection makes it that much easier for those with wealth to control people; immature and undereducated people will often believe whatever they’re told.
One such example of how important feelings are is a story of Isaac Newton creating the idea of gravity by merely watching an apple fall to the ground. It's a cute story, but that intuitive idea was based on an ocean of feelings he had built with his scientific experiments. He felt there was some universal force at work in nature besides Aristotle's final forms. But he didn't stop there with the idea of gravity. He then began testing the idea to see how well gravity worked to predict natural events, like tides and planetary movements. And, almost all the time, it worked! As a result, the feeling of a simplified nature kept growing.
Also, in his Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey described how important the ideas of habits and feeling-impulses were; our feelings and actions help build our habits, and they in turn help mold our impulsive feelings for those actions. Feeling how merely smiling, for example, makes one happier, in turn helps build a smiling habit, which then increases such feelings! In any case, however, the more students experiment with healthful actions in the real world, the deeper they feel any idea. Faculty psychology merely makes the learning process more complicated while also endorsing the educational status quo.
More Modern Developments
In our conservative public schools book-knowledge has remained all important, and after early IQ tests were created in the early 1900s, it became even easier to make education more artificial and difficult by grouping same-age children into classes of abilities, especially in urban schools. I went to such public and religious schools in Chicago. Good learners have always been valuable to the established status quo, but when they’re isolated in their own classes it becomes more difficult for slower students to learn. Many educators felt ability-grouped classes would help children feel most comfortable and thus learn more. For us liberals, however, such grouping merely makes it more difficult to grow democratic feelings of equality, and weaken elitist student feelings. In many rural schools, however, such grouping was more difficult, and thus learning and character development was stronger and more democratic. There the one-room school became the model. In it children of all ages and abilities studied together, with older students regularly helping younger ones learn their lessons. Thus they more easily built a helping character habit many urban students never learned in their age and IQ-segregated classes.
In short, Dewey’s experimental model of learning continued challenging the very foundation of all conservative public schools, a system very ripe for improvement before World War 1. To Dewey, a conservative learning model based on faculties and IQ tests, even if they were unbiased, catered more to building habit-feelings of obedience useful mainly to corporations and military services, rather than for building a healthier democracy, where workers, soldiers, and minorities had more equal decision-making power for controlling their own fate and destiny.
For Dewey, such conditioning began in first grade, as entire classes were given their academic work and told how to complete it. As a result, even before becoming teenagers, students were already conditioned to sit quietly and keep working on their book assignments! Those who were bored or openly rebellious simply dropped out or were removed from class until they too felt they should obey and accept the conservative book-centered learning model. Today, however, a drop-out problem remains very serious throughout the country. And, no doubt, it's what many conservatives want to happen. Many want our greatly divided economic and educational classes to stay in place; it helps lower competition for the jobs they want and get. For such conservatives a faculty psychology thus produces a winning situation. For most of the 1900s it helped keep society racially and economically divided, and corporate CEOs happy to have obedient workers who didn’t want to unionize.
More recently, however, since 2,000, for millions of people, a conservative learning model has become much more questionable! More and more of their taxes are being needed to pay for expensive prisons, healthcare, and other needed social programs. Thus, more and more people are asking if more liberal public schools couldn't be doing more to help solve such growing personal and social weaknesses? After all, this is supposed to be a democratic republic, not a feudalistic economic republic, or as some liberal writers now called it, a moneyocracy or dollarocracy.
We’ll see later in Section 34 how some conservatives are using the idea of a charter school movement, begun in the early 1990s, to convince tax payers their public schools can only be improved if they become run by the business community, on either a for-profit basis or non-profit basis, but in either case without unionized teachers! To the conservative business community, unions merely reduce their profit margins and political power. Around the nation the idea's being experimented with. But in reality they're doing something conservatives have been doing for over a hundred years: weakening and wrecking any kind of union power. The feudal elite has always feared any power but their own, and union power merely takes more taxpayer money away from corporations, thus lessening their political power.
To us liberal Deweyans, however, and to liberal reformers like Diane Ravitch (Reign of Error) the charter school movement is merely another conservative business model useful for increasing their profits more than anything else. In both kinds of school systems the center of focus remains on the book and teacher, rather than on students and their needs for learning some skills and knowledge before graduation. And, as mentioned earlier, even many colleges and universities too want a faculty-based book-centered system to go all the way down to the primary grades. In the early 1900s, for example, many of them started creating so-called accreditation organizations to sanction their conservative system itself, and thus ensure a continuing source of student-clients. Only accredited schools were said to be the best kinds, and so parents accepted that situation. They felt they were the best schools for getting better jobs. But again, recent economic events since 2008 and our present on-going recession and high jobless rate keep reminding people both public and charter schools are not producing the social results many people had hoped they would.
Meantime, the continued concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands has been used to control more Democratic and Republican politicians. In early 2010 a conservative Supreme Court said corporations and their money are people, and so have first amendment free speech rights. They, in effect, formalized what conservatives down through history have been doing: using their money-power to keep making more of it. In the following section, then, we’ll look a little closer at the famous IQ tests, and then after that, again at how a faculty model of psychology was finally proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of conservative status quo educators.
Why Separate Students From Their Own Feelings?
Results help determine the value and worth of any idea, and on those grounds faculty psychology, even its modern secular version, can simply be judged as less than the best learning model. Experimental learning, based on building habit-arts of intelligently testing ideas to solve challenges here and now, helps unify student body and mind -- feelings and ideas. Thus learning becomes more naturalistic and reality-based! For us liberal Deweyans, with the emphasis on the feeling of enjoyable learning, and ideas for body-mind health, experimental learning helps students feel each day is a ‘born again’ day, where more academic facts are learned in the process of learning more about how to intelligently keep improving life! Such feelings help make school fresh and new each day.
To some conservatives such talk about education may sound silly and overly optimistic, but is it? For us, the weakest result of conservative book-centered public schools is removing student feelings, especially the desire for enjoyable learning. Without that feeling, any kind of learning becomes much more difficult. Many people agree with Aristotle, learning should often be a painful affair. Faculty psychology may not justify that feeling, but it certainly encourages people to believe public schools should teach only book facts. However, when student enjoyment and interest is no longer important in a learning process, and teacher obedience is demanded, then school easily produces slavish and bored feelings at least, and disgust at most. High drop-out rates as well as very high prison populations tell such public tax-supported schools are not fulfilling their social duty to intelligently educate the next generation! As a result, even the best ideas are soon forgotten; they have few feelings to support them.
For example, for those who were ‘taught’ English for twelve years, what’s the difference between a gerund and an infinitive, what’s a comma used for, what's an apostrophe, and what’s the difference between a phrase and a clause? (If you said a clause is Santa’s last name you probably should be writing jokes for talk shows.) What are indefinite pronouns, and how can they be used to describe our own habits? And for those who studied math for 10 years, how are two mixed numbers multiplied or divided? When's the last time you ever had to divide such numbers? Besides being a good description of an odd-acting relative, what is a mixed number? How can the Pythagorean theorem be proved? What’s the capital of Paraguay and how many ex-Nazis are still living there? Who was the seventh US President? (Hint: even if you have some folding money, don’t look in your wallet!)
Meanwhile a significant number of our senior citizens are hungry for intelligent exercise and human companionship, and many students would like to interact intelligently with them. Who knows, seniors may even help some learn some new ways of contributing to life in some positive way. Life is segregated enough without keeping our knowledge-hungry children segregated too. As more and more people are realizing, retirement years don’t necessarily have to be unproductive years. But, the more public taxes go to schools based on student attendance, and thus keep students in school, the less desire there is to allow students such freedom.
Another point is simply this: though life has changed much since the Middle Ages, basically our all-important institutions are still feudalistic! Their power is overly concentrated and thus socially dangerous. A thousand years ago educational power was concentrated in secluded, isolated monastery schools, and their religious habits helped slow the growth of just about all forms of secular knowledge, both personal and scientific, to say nothing of growing democratic habits. Human and natural science facts in particular, like building healthy motives and experimental skills for learning secular kinds of knowledge, were not only ignored but in fact actively killed for centuries. Their concentrated educational power gave religious conservatives the right to teach mainly obedience to their rituals. Only as monks and nuns connected with other people and helped solve their problems in the real world did they help discover more useful facts, make life better for themselves as well as others, and also build more excellent caring and kind character habit-arts. What's more, it was all accomplished with an experimental learning model. Even praying was basically another kind of subconscious experiment. So, aren't the same kinds of educational results being produced today in many of our monastery-like public schools, where students are kept away from their communities and healthfully intelligent kinds of democratic interactions? And how many of those public schools today are still helping keep life boring and routine not only for students, but dangerous for communities?
No doubt, there are a few encouraging signs for improving those kinds of social results. For a while I worked at a high school for advanced students, a so-called Magnate School, and I actually did see a class in psychology being taught. That was encouraging, even if it was just another general book-based survey course where students redd and then answered book questions. At least they began learning a few useful ideas. But again, how deep is their knowledge if they don't actually see how those ideas can work to help solve personal challenges? How much Behavior modification practice are they getting? Are they seeing how such important ideas can be used in the real world, or just reading to pass the next test?
Even such general survey classes are a beginning to learning more about psychological and also economic health, even when they’re treated as just another book-centered study. When I was in high school, back in those wild and crazy 1960s, Behavioral psychology was something learned completely outside the classroom, and only by certain kinds of student activists interested in learning more about how to condition students to act in certain ways. Many student activists know what I mean. But what good did it do for all those students who already had serious psychological issues, like low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, concentration issues, and so on?
Psychologists tell us young children feel they are the center of the universe, so to speak, and want to be treated as equally as anyone else. As we've seen, that feeling has helped Finnish students become more secure and productive at school. After all, how can we expect students to learn facts and test well when they feel they're stupid and don't know anything? So, to many Deweyans like me, our own public primary schools are the perfect natural place to start teaching young folks about what ideas experimental education celebrates, and more importantly, how they can use those ideas themselves to keep learning what they want to learn, one step at a time and one day at a time. Children are learning sponges, so why not create more liberal public elementary schools where intelligent experimentation is a normal part of each day? And we say for that result to happen, they should become much better connected in constructive and positive ways to what's going on in their own communities, rather than merely staying chained to their book-facts day in and day out. The sooner they learn the basics of experimental psychology, like what intelligent actions are, and how to learn them, the better off our nation will be, unless of course you like your tax monies used to build more jails and rehab clinics, and hire more guards, public defenders, and judges. For us Deweyans, the more our schools produce feelings for democratic actions, equal rights, and intelligent habit-arts, the more democratic and intelligent our nation will become. Children are naturally interested in themselves anyway, so learning to intelligently improve themselves experimentally would, no doubt, help make school that much more meaningful, helpful, useful, and rewarding.
A Danger With Experimental Leaning
Within such experimental schools children will also find it easier to learn another very useful idea. Dewey said it something like this: Because results and motives determine the value of any idea and feeling, and results always come AFTER we act, we never know AT THE TIME WE ACT how useful our feelings and ideas are! It sounds like another one of those important philosophic ideas most children are just not ready to learn! But feeling that way merely makes it more difficult for them to start learning how real drama and excitement is a natural part of all learning events.
It's also a humbling thought too. Should anyone feel their actions and motives are good and worthy at the time they use them, or should they feel any feeling and idea might not produce the results they want? In other words, along with any feeling and idea we experiment with, there’s always a degree of uncertainty and danger. No one knows how good their idea is until it’s tested. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but it’s a fact of life in an always changing world, so why not start teaching it to students? And what better way to do that than by using experimental kinds of learning projects; they make learning a kind of on-going dramatic adventure, as science's history often teaches us. Results produced yesterday might not produce the same results today, especially where people are concerned. So, the more children are taught to focus on the motives and future results of their actions, the less dangerous life will become, and the more in touch students will be in our always changing world.
Thank goodness, most of the time real dangers are not great from our daily actions, but not learning to feel and relish life’s always-present uncertainty, even in our small daily actions, merely decreases important feelings of wonder and excitement. After all, not feeling food may be full of dangerous germs merely helps increase the dangers of sickness. No doubt, it’s not very dangerous or humbling to empty the garbage, fix a meal, or finally wash the underwear that’s almost ready to run away, but the less one feels some of life's always-present uncertainty, the greater the chances for producing dangerous results. So, why shouldn’t children begin learning such ideas even in grade school? Aren't those feelings a big part of psychological health too, and wouldn’t it also increase respect for our public schools, rather than feeling most of what they’re teaching is really a waste of time and tax payer money?
For all such learning challenges intelligent and experimental role-playing is a very important learning tool, but only if students are allowed to practice the art intelligently and feel ideas more deeply. The educational need is already there; young students are immature precisely because they haven't felt such ideas very deeply. As we’ll see in Section 37, Why Not Reality School?, experimental psychology can play a much more important role in helping students deepen all such useful feelings and ideas.
It's a shame really. As a general rule, formally teaching psychology in our public schools has been almost completely ignored, helping leave students more immature and vulnerable than necessary. Obviously not enough parents know how useful such knowledge can be; many are often too busy digging themselves out of artificially caused economic rip offs to know what their schools are doing. As a result, not enough parents are demanding role-playing activities become a much more important part of the school day. When they’re not, then children may also grow a perverted feeling of educational excellence; how can one compare different models of learning when only one is known? So, people continue feeling mere book-ideas are really the road to a better life, and they're not smart if they don't learn them and score well on standardized tests. In fact, most of the accomplished people on earth never took such tests. Is it yet another nationwide educational conspiracy for test-making corporate profits? That might be saying just a little too much, but already many teachers know how useful such an active experimental learning model is, and so they should be held partly responsible by parents for not teaching such useful and practical learning skills.
27. IQ, YOU Q, WE ALL Q!
Mental Age Divided By Real Age = IQ
Those 2 simple letters, IQ, are 2 of the most famous letters in all of modern education. Today many are quick to take an IQ test, believing it will tell them how intelligent they really are. It’s another result of our test-dominated mania. Even though many teenagers jokingly say those letters really stand for the words 'idiot quotient', they mean 'intelligence quotient'. For us Deweyan liberals, however, 3 questions become important: what kind of intelligence are they measuring; how valid are they; and how should they be used in the classroom? Can such tests tell us how much commonsense intelligence people have, or how intelligent a person’s helpful character habits are? No, certainly not. Basically such tests reveal just 2 kinds of intelligence: word meanings and intuitive math reasoning.
Don't get intimidated by the word quotient. It’s merely a math word meaning the result of dividing one number by another. For example, the quotient of 8 divided by 2 is 4. So, how you get your IQ is the result of dividing your mental age by your real age and then multiplying by 100. For example, if a 10 year olds 'mental' age is 13, then when it's divided by the student's actual age, 10, and multiplied by 100 the IQ becomes 130. That, by the way, is definitely way above the average of 100. Most peoples' IQ is between 80 and 120.
So, naturally, the question becomes: what do testers mean by one's 'mental age'? What does it really mean to say a 10 year olds mental age is 13? Does it mean they're as smart as a 13 year old, or does it merely mean a 10 year olds vocabulary and math skills most closely resemble average 13 year olds' answers? If you guessed the second alternative, go to the head of the IQ class. IQ is, then, basically a measure of how many meanings and definitions you know, and also how many number patterns you can see, compared, of course, to those answers of older and younger students. For example, what’s the next number in the sequence 1, 4, 7, 10, ____? Obviously, knowing who has more of those abilities is useful to people at all social levels, from government to business to the military. In fact, the first US IQ tests were created during World War 1 to help the military identify people with those kinds of skills.
At first the IQ test became simply another basic tool for measuring how a student's vocabulary and math intuition compared to other students! It should be mentioned, however, because both those skills can keep growing all through life, and thus keep raising one's IQ, it also means a person's intelligence is not a static and unchanging part of everyone's psyche, as many conservatives would like to believe! Like any other habit-art, however, one's IQ too can keep growing all through life; the more words and patterns one learns, the more one's academic IQ keeps growing. Thus, early IQ tests measured only 2 narrow and limited kinds of intelligence, the kind valuable to educators, businesspeople, and the military. In education, however, it was soon used to group students together into similar scoring groups; it helped make teaching easier. Teachers could make one lesson plan for the whole class, rather than students of different IQs. As we'll see, however, Dewey was quick to criticize such uses for IQ tests; among other things, it made learning for the less developed more difficult. It ignored how smarter students can become merely by being around smarter people. Thus, our 3rd question: how should such tests be used?
Believe it or not, even a conservative Nobel Prize winner has used student IQ numbers to argue Africans are inherently less intelligent than white folks! It was thus used to argue against busing to eliminate racial segregation in public schools. To him IQ numbers don't lie, and so we liberals also ask: how valid are such tests for all students?
A Little IQ History
Actually, such intelligence tests started growing in ancient China with Confucius's (d. 479 BCE) help. He wanted to improve the government, so he suggested testing people to see how smart they were, so the government itself would have a more stable and better working bureaucracy. Today they've become our Civil Service exams.
Such ideas were useful in the West as well, along with a rather conservative model of human intelligence. In fact, for much of Western philosophic history small feudalistic elite ruling classes have often wanted to believe a person’s intelligence was set and finished at birth. Such ideas were often used as an excuse for not building public schools for everyone; waging war was much more profitable for those with big armies, and so uneducated soldiers were needed. As a result, only a small wealthy class of students was educated, while building public schools for everyone was put off for centuries.
In fact, in general ancient conservative and moderate philosophers usually painted such closed and unchanging pictures of human intelligence. To people like Plato such skills were basically set and thus determined what people are and will remain. Even before him Socrates seriously wondered if excellence or virtue could even be taught, based on his assumption such skills as intelligent were really controlled specifically by the gods themselves. He himself felt the god Apollo had given him his questioning skills to prove people weren't as smart as they thought they were.
Determined and pre-ordained models of intelligence were in general accepted in the ancient world, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus included. They were all pretty much determinists. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato generally believed genius itself was explained as someone’s being directly helped by a god. Eventually, however, one of Democritus's creative followers, Atomist Epicurus (d. 270 BCE), began suggesting a new atomic model to include the possibility of chance, free will, and self-determination. He invented the famous idea of an atomic 'swerve', so people could become more responsible for improving their intelligence! Sometimes, he said, mind-atoms swerve to make alternative choices real possibilities. No doubt, it helped justify the feeling of freedom he, and most everyone else, normally felt while making any decision; nothing seemed to prevent alternative actions except the results of ideas, and thus by seeing different results of one's actions, one’s intelligence itself could continue growing all through life.
Conservative Christian thinkers like Augustine then tried combining Plato's deterministic ideas of intelligence to Epicurus's idea of free will. With his assumption about an all-knowing god, he accepted the old determinist view of intelligence, except he couldn't. If people don't also have free will, how can any Church ritual be justified? Thus, he merely joined together 2 contradictory ideas about human intelligence: it's determined and it's also free to choose. In any case, only a small chosen elect were destined for heaven by god's grace while the rest were ignored.
In general, one's intelligence was determined in god's plan and set for all eternity. Intelligence too was basically something already finished and eternally constant, as were those destined for heaven by god's grace. With such conservative religious assumptions, static and unchanging models of human intelligence remained strong all during the feudalistic Middle Ages and even into the 1800s. All that time it helped justify not building public schools for everyone to learn more secular kinds of knowledge. Thus such ideas of intelligence continued restricting the growth of democratic habits and ideas, especially the idea of equality. People were told only in god's eyes were everyone equal, but on earth social inequality continued on. However, after 1800, the growth of experimental science began weakening such ideas. The stronger the Industrial Revolution grew with scientific ideas, and the more people began seeing how life can become what we humans make of it, the more old conservative static and set models of intelligence were seen as merely the result of conservative assumptions. Slowly a public school system for all began growing in Western civilization.
To help identify how intelligent, or retarded young folks were, the first IQ tests were built in France to help reveal a child's native intelligence as defined primarily by the number of different words known and one’s intuitive math skills. With such knowledge teaching itself became easier. Teachers could better fit student studies to their abilities. Children were often divided into different classes, based on their IQ scores of above average, average, and below average. For teachers, grouping made their jobs easier; one lesson plan could fit all students in a class quite nicely, and so individual learning differences and needs were minimized. At the same time, however, it also made learning more difficult for slower learners, as we saw in the last section. Below average students learned less, merely by not being around more intelligent students. Too bad students don't get to apply the same rating method to their teachers, so the more caring teachers would better help slower learners.
In France in the late 1800s, psychologists began cutting their umbilical cord from their philosophic mother, so to speak. Educational psychology research had been growing since the 1700s, and a few decades later became a separate subject. Thus, the idea of measuring a person’s intelligence continued growing. A person's definition skills could be easily measured and given a number score, as could their intuitive math thinking. Such tests then quickly came to the US in the early 1900s when, during World War 1, the military needed more information about their soldiers. No doubt, those who scored lower on the test were often put closer to the front lines, where millions sheepishly kept obeying their generals and continued killing each other needlessly with poison gas and artillery shells. While manning his trench post, Corporal Hitler himself was almost killed by one such shell.
Soon afterwards, then, many conservative educators began using IQ test results in public schools. For one thing, they were used to justify racially segregated schools; test scores showed Africans regularly scored less than white kids, and so must be less intelligent by nature. Thus, the question of test validity became more important. Were they really testing native intelligence, or were they merely testing how well white students knew the words used in their homes and schools?
Liberals like Dewey was such a liberal; he responded quickly and forcefully to use uses and conclusions. To people like him, the idea of racially inferior intelligence was sheer nonsense and pure propaganda. Other tests had already shown most all students are capable of learning intelligent skills, like how to experimentally solve challenges and intelligently get around obstacles in constructive ways. So for Dewey, the questions became how valid are such tests, and how should their results be used in a democracy?
What's more, he was a naturalist, and so saw everyone's IQ as growing and organic all through life, rather than being a faculty one's born with and never changes. He believed one's intelligence is always affected by one's social experiences; a stimulating and challenging environment keeps one's IQ growing all through life. In other words, everyone has some intelligence, so the educational challenge in all democracies became how to best educate all students, not just the smarter ones. Most everyone has some freedom to learn how to intelligently choose and build the habits they want, and the younger the person, the more freedom they have to choose what and how to learn. Their minds are still relatively open to learning new habits. Thus, building liberal public schools where useful and intelligent practical skills were taught daily was more than justified by a more liberal model of intelligence. Children are more naturally suited to learning such skills, as Plato himself saw centuries earlier.
Of course over time IQ tests have been evolving as employers and teachers wanted to know more than a person's vocabulary and math skills. The real world has many uses for such skills like creative problem-solving, logical reasoning, code-breaking, intuitive thinking, and reading comprehension skills. Liberal educators thus came to feel there's more to intelligence than merely knowing a lot of words and intuitively seeing what a missing number should be in a certain number sequence. After all, just because some can see what the next number in the sequence 1, 4, 9, ______ is doesn't automatically make them intelligent. If you guessed 16, by the way, you were right, but is that really the only kind of intelligence our schools should be teaching? No doubt, some young students see such answers more quickly than others, seeing the sequence is the result of multiplying numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 by themselves, or in math language, x2. But, the liberal educational challenge was teaching students how to use their skills constructively for the public good.
So, with the growth of experimental learning, Behavioral psychology, and Dewey's Democracy and Education, habit-arts of intelligent self-determination and intelligent self-directed learning became much more important parts of intelligence than merely knowing a lot of definitions. Using one's ideas intelligently, like helping those less well off, is also a very important part of intelligence. With it more democratic forms of government become easier to build. No doubt, such an evolutionary model of intelligence was helped by people like Charles Darwin, who said all species evolve and grow through time. But all through this progressive period in the early 1900s, the now familiar clash between conservative and liberal educational ideas began taking shape. After settling the question about the evolutionary nature of intelligence, the 2 remaining questions were argued and kept alive. How valid were IQ tests, and what should they be used for? Conservatives, of course, wanted to use them to prove their racial feelings of inequality were entirely justified, while democratic liberals attacked their validity and their conservative uses.
Dewey spoke out about both those questions. For one thing, he criticized using IQ test scores to compare students in different economic classes to each other. For him grouping students according to such tests was educationally counterproductive, especially for slow learners. For him IQ test scores should help teachers take all students from where they're at to higher levels of knowledge and skills, rather than merely isolating students into classes and expecting less from slower learners. After he saw how IQ tests were being used to group similar students together, he wrote: "How one person's abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher's business. It is irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall have the opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning." It's a fine example of someone who's concerned with educating the student, rather than just keeping all students tied to the same book assignments. Liberal child-centered schools, then, focus on educating all students to the best of their abilities. At the time (early 1900s) mean racial bigotry and harsh ‘Jim Crow’ segregated schools were widespread throughout the nation, and many said they were justified by supposedly scientific IQ scores! How could educated IQ test-makers really put their own personal prejudices into such tests? As time went on, however, it became more obvious that was exactly what was happening!
Parents Begin Questioning IQ Test Validity
The more it became obvious personal prejudices were a big part of such tests, the easier it became for minority parents and students to begin speaking out against them. People soon discovered IQ tests actually did have a number of class prejudices built into them, even though many psychologists said they were a good way to discover any child's intelligence. What was happening? Well, it was easy to see; the white psychologists choosing the very words students were tested with were simply using words they themselves used, and they were very different from the words minority students were learning in their homes! In short, white psychologists were putting their own verbal habits into the test, rather than using words minority students would know! Thus, children with similar social backgrounds to the psychologists would naturally score higher on their IQ tests than children from different economic and social classes! Thus justifying racial segregation 'scientifically' in effect made the academic road for minorities even more difficult and stressful! It also became easier for conservative white teachers to believe such low-scoring students weren't really capable of learning much, and so also felt they should have their own separate schools.
As a result, racially separate schools remained justified until 1954 when the Supreme Court said separate but equal 'Jim Crow' schools violate the constitutional idea of equal rights. Even in the early 1970s some supposedly very smart people still felt Africans were by nature less intelligent than whites, and different IQ scores proved it! Believe it or not, in the early 1970s I myself heard one Nobel Prize winner, William Schockley, say Africans are mentally inferior to whites, based on IQ test results alone! Such ideas were also used in anti-busing arguments too. Why bother trying to integrate schools by busing inferior students into better schools; they’ll always be less intelligent? Clearly, for us Deweyan liberals, such feelings and ideas have no place in a vibrant and growing democracy, where all law-abiding people deserved equal rights and opportunities.
In general, the use of IQ tests in the 20th century is another fine example of how mere personal feelings and speaking habits were often used to keep minority students from getting better paying jobs after high school, and also for even going to college too. Such feelings all rest on ideas assumed to be true, but they too rest merely on other human feelings and ideas, and not on any natural difference in intelligence itself. After all, all tests are made by humans, and so their own habits are put into them. Psychologists too know only the words and ideas produced by their own speaking habits; what else could they do but put them into IQ tests?
Armed with such criticisms, many African parents became better at demanding IQ tests not be used in such ways. They simply asked themselves why their children were missing answers to IQ questions Anglo students were getting. Conservatives naturally said it’s because minorities are naturally less intelligent than whites, but were they? Without criticizing those kinds of dangerous undemocratic feelings about racial superiority, it leaves more educational obstacles for their children. With a conservative view of intelligence, racial discrimination can easily continue on, but for we liberal Deweyans personal habits, not pre-set intelligence levels, always limit not only how we think, but also what we think, and even what facts we choose to support our own habits. Such conservative arguments should be a lesson to all liberal democrats -- definitions and intuitive reasoning aren't all there is to intelligence; in fact, they're only a rather restricted and narrow form of intelligence!
Liberals had a right to complain. Conservatives were often using IQ test results to keep education book-centered and also class-centered too. Their own children were suffering merely because they were told such tests are really a scientifically valid way to measure intelligence. Sometimes they were told grouping kids into slow-learning classes was best for them; it kept them from getting bored or suffering from being asked to learn too much. Even Einstein suffered as a child from such schools in the 1890s. As mentioned earlier, one story describes one of his primary teachers telling him he would amount to nothing unless he studied more of what the teacher thought he should learn. But even throughout college he was interested mainly in physics and math, and so didn't do the other work teachers said he should do. He too was the typical victim of a conservative school system which generally ignored individual learning needs and demanded he obey their educational ideas. Eventually Albert found a job not teaching in a university, by rather in a patent office. It turned out well, however; with the extra time on his hands he kept studying physics and talking with other scientists. Eventually in 1905, at the tender age of 24, he published 3 papers creating the new physics model called Relativity! Recently experiments taught him the old Newtonian assumptions about space, time, and matter being all eternal and constantly the same should no longer be used. Perhaps his example is the best argument for not allowing mere IQ tests to continue dictating how students should be kept enslaved to academic book-facts, and allowing students to study what they want to learn more about.
Around the country conservative schools continue wrestling with the definition of intelligence. Recently in California it was broadened to include other academic skills for high school graduation. A so-called Exit Exam was built, once again relying heavily on knowing more academic facts. Even though many students have failed to meet the new qualifications, it's still in place, and in some places getting even more academic than ever. It measures some basic skills of intelligence like understanding what one’s reads, arranging one's thoughts logically in writing, how to reason inductively from some data to a general conclusion, and of course some math skills. After all, college guidance counselors and employers too want to avoid accepting those without such skills.
Dewey basically agreed with such tests at the high school level, but only for those going on to college; why make all students learn what 70% won't need after graduation? And why keep the emphasis on teaching academic facts in grades 1 through 10. In them, he said, intelligence is best built with first sense-based experience, and then constructive kinds of building projects. Only those students going on to college should then use their high school junior and senior years to increase their factual knowledge and writing skills, to help make college work more meaningful. For Dewey, reasoning wisely and testing one’s ideas was the most important intelligent art to learn. After all, we all live in a social world, and so learning how to keep intelligently improving it and ourselves is really the most important part of intelligence. Who would say habitual liars or dangerous psychopaths are intelligent just because they score above 120 on an IQ test? In other words, the best kind of intelligence depends on much more than knowing a lot of words and how to see the next number in a sequence. Comparing and contrasting ideas to see their different results, and actively testing constructive ideas, is an intelligent skill much more important than merely knowing word definitions. With such ideas he too continued questioning and criticizing narrow conservative ideas of intelligence still used in many of our public schools. And of course today a college education depends more and more on one's economic class too.
Today, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are often a much better judge of college success rather than just IQ scores. But Dewey had a much more socially liberal definition of intelligence, and so he and many others began building more child-centered schools throughout the nation, where student learning needs were the center of attention, rather than their books. And, a little later in Section 31, we'll see some of the results of those schools for teaching students how to learn. Which brings us to this sections final question...
What Really Is Intelligence?
In general, answers to that question of course will depend on one's basic conservative, moderate, or liberal assumptions about people. Conservatives have tended to favor a rather narrow model of intelligence, based of course on their own academic habits and skills. But for liberal democrats excellent character habits are also just as important to teach in all public schools! How else can a nation become more democratic and less feudalistic?
With a more liberal definition of intelligence, it becomes easier to see knowing word definitions and seeing patterns in sequences of numbers isn't really the best model of intelligence. Questions like what should be the next number in the sequence 3, 6, 11, _____? tests merely one small part of intelligence, not all of it. Thus, over the years with liberal criticism the definition of intelligence has kept growing to include character skills as well as academic skills like reading, writing, and calculating skills. As that happened personal recommendations from teachers became another important sign of student social intelligence; they help show a student's commitment to worthy social goals like helping others less well off. They all help build a more rounded and thorough picture of a student's intelligence. In other words, how can a truly scientific picture of intelligence separate such character skills from academic skills, even though character skills aren't measured in the same way math skills can be. But, does that mean intelligent character habits are completely unscientific and so shouldn’t be taught? Obviously not! The more such intelligent habits aren't taught, the more dangerous and expensive life becomes for everyone. Thus, again, we see how educationally intelligent constructive community projects are for public school students. They teach such important forms of intelligence besides mere word and math skills. By the way, how many times outside of schools have you been asked to find the next number in a sequence, which in above one is 18? No doubt, life itself has many patterns to it, so isn't it just as important to see non-math patterns, and if so, then why not teach that skill too?
Suppose, for example, some students see the pattern of improvement at a neighborhood park, and choose to build a fence to make it more beautiful. Obviously traditional standardized IQ tests can’t abstractly measure and quantify what character skills were learned, like how the fence was designed and built, and most importantly how much social character and pride the students felt during and after the cooperative project. But does that mean those intelligent skills weren’t learned and hence their work was unscientific and unintelligent? Obviously not! And yet the conservative No Child Left Behind and the Common Core Book Curriculum laws continue restricting students from learning such intelligent and valuable character habits while in school! Instead, they continue making students learn more and more abstract book-facts, telling parents they can get better jobs later on. Meanwhile, bored and disinterested students continue dropping out and not learning how to think and work intelligently.
Thus, for us liberals the educational challenge becomes 2-fold. The first is to begin reforming and improving our conservative neighborhood public schools to teach other kinds of intelligent habits, and then to find some new ways of testing how strong those intelligent character habits are. With those kinds of intelligence, universities and employers will have a better picture of a student’s skills. Today they’re often called extra-curricular skills, but even they remain things like athletics and band membership. No doubt, as more and more parents broaden their ideas of intelligence, schools will start becoming the democratically useful institutions they can be. If knowledge tests can be built, then why not character tests too?
Growing up in Vermont, Dewey learned strong democratic habits, and so he rejected such a narrow definition of intelligence as artificial; it separated character intelligence from academic intelligence, when in reality they exist as an organic growing whole all through life! How else could some adult IQ scores keep increasing with age? To Dewey such conservative assumptions about intelligence were just that, assumptions. They rested on conservative feelings about both nature and human nature. As we've seen throughout these pages, however, philosophy's history itself shows such artificial separations and narrow definitions have been built into conservative models of nature, ethics, politics, art, and learning! In general, such ideas were built by conservative and moderate establishment philosophers who wanted to please those with feudalistic power who were supporting them. Conservative George Hegel might be a good example of such a philosopher.
The thing liberal parents, students, and teachers should remember is this: From primitive times to today, people have normally projected their own inner habit-feelings into their ideas about life and nature. Even philosophers normally want to talk about what their own habits tell them is most important. So, from Plato to Dewey they've all painted their feelings into their philosophic models. Before the scientific revolution, then, philosophic objectivity was a myth. How else can we explain all the different religious and philosophic models in the world today?
Thus, it’s taken thousands of years, and many centuries of scientific testing to realize even philosophers' pictures of intelligence as well as Truth are all painted with the feelings and ideas their actions help intensify. In that sense, then, liberal Protagoras was right: mankind is the measure of all things, of things which are and which are not. Only as the art of experimental testing began teaching people how to use an idea’s objective results to best judge any idea, did a much more reliable set of ideas begin growing in our modern world. For Dewey too, the more ideas work to produce intelligently constructive and peaceful results, the stronger they become; in short, intelligent isn't a thing, it's an adverb; it modified and changes actions to make them more or less intelligent. So, shouldn't so-called IQ tests also help students and teachers see what their weaknesses are, and then be shown how to keep improving them? Without using such tests that way, then it becomes even more difficult for students to learn how to intelligently guide their own growth and knowledge, and to feel just as intelligent as anyone else. Such a learning habit-art makes us all more intelligent.