Page 1.6: Sections 28-32
28. HOW FAULTY IS FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY?
In this section we go still deeper into educational psychology and its history with the idea of faculties. Why? Well, because it’s still important idea in education, especially the conservative model. Only recently has that basic conservative and moderate psychological idea been challenged by Dewey's more scientific Behavioral idea of habits, and it's resulted in a very different educational model for our public schools. If a faculty model of psychology is wrong, then the entire conservative goal of teaching academic book-facts to everyone has no basis in evidence! And if that’s true, then even teaching students lots of book-facts at the university level, about separate subjects like math, English, science, and history is also unjustified as a means of training future teachers for our public schools! Clearly, whether separate learning faculties exist is an important question.
The idea of learning faculties is an important educational subject, especially for all liberal parents, teachers, and students who want schools to become student-centered, rather than book-centered. In truth, faculty psychology continues being used to fuel a conservative public school standardized testing engine. As we’ve seen, the idea has been used probably since before Plato, while the newer Behavioral learning ideas of habits and impulses are only about 100 years old. In this section, then, we’ll see a little more of its history and also how modern science has continued weakening a faculty model of learning.
For many pages now we've seen how a faculty psychology has helped justify Western civilization's conservative and moderate book-based models, from Plato and Aristotle to modern times. After them, the Christian tradition kept the model alive in one form or another; Augustine named 3 of them -- understanding, feeling, and will. Later on John Locke named only 2 of them -- understanding and will, while Jean Rousseau named pleasure/pain, sensing, reasoning, desire/emotion, and will. To Dewey and many other liberals in the early 1900s, however, such a variety of faculties was proof no one really knew for sure what faculties people had, or even that they existed! Luckily, with the growth and spread of experimental learning in the 1800s, a idea of actually testing for faculties grew larger.
The more psychology itself became an experimental science, the more modern psychologists like Dewey began asking a very simple question: Is faculty psychology our best learning model, and is there any objective evidence for it? In other words, do separate learning faculties really exist, or is learning really a more holistic and organic body-mind affair, based on ideas like habits, impulses, and active experimentation? Also, are all people born with about the same kinds of separate mental faculties, like reasoning, remembering, and aggressiveness? If so, then what subjects should teachers use to strengthen them? And if not, then why keep teaching the same subjects to just about all students? In short, are we remaining a slave to our own ancient and medieval psychological habits, or is there really some solid evidence such faculties really exist? And if not, then how can we start building better public schools to better serve student and social needs? Such liberal questions were alive and vibrant in the early 1900s, especially in the US before and after World War 1.
More Psyche History
Since ancient times, conservatives and moderates have aimed to produce knowledge that was absolutely certain and unchanging for all time. Only liberal Sophists and Skeptics rejected that assumption. So, it became important for conservatives like Plato and moderates like Aristotle to picture human nature as having the power to know such eternal Truth. Thus a set of more or less separate mental faculties became important. In fact, Hopkins (144-145) describes a Zoroastrian model of human faculties even before Plato: “Zoroastrian belief contains a replica of (primitive) ideas in modernized form. The soul (or psyche) consists of several spiritual parts: the breath, conscious intelligent will-soul, and the pre-existent superior soul.” So, even conservative religious thinking before Plato suggested a faculty model of learning, each of us having a number of different faculties; among other things it also helped justify the belief in dreams as seeing into another kind of more perfect world.
Then, in the West during Plato's optimistic middle period he suggested 3 general faculties in all people -- a nutritive, a sensitive, and rational faculties; later he named desire as a 4th one. Obviously, even he wasn't sure himself, but in the absence of experimental testing, such ideas idea continued being used. After all, if we couldn’t know eternal Truth, then the entire quest for certainty became useless; clearly, religious conservatives like Plato didn’t want that to happen.
It’s fairly easy to see weakness even in Plato’s thinking. For example, he said plants have just a nutritive faculty -- they only grow and reproduce. Today, however, we know plants can not only sense different energies, but even act intelligently to keep growing when conditions become harsh! They both conserve water and also move to absorb more sunlight. And of course animals too have some degree of intelligence; octopi, for example, are some of the most intelligent sea animals; they can solve complex problems; even apes can think creatively too.
In his Republic, Plato described how different faculties work to learn about 4 different kinds of knowledge. He needed an imagining faculty to know some objects are really artistic creations, like paintings and statues; he needed a believing faculty to know about natural objects in the physical world; he needed a thinking faculty for reasoning about, say, math ideas; and he needed an intuitive faculty for directly grasping and beholding the highest and best kinds of knowledge -- Spirit-Objects! And, what's more, the last 2 faculties, thinking and intuitive grasping or beholding, must themselves be spirit-objects, or else they wouldn't be able to know Spirit-Ideas.
So, in all people Plato pictured learning as being a set of more or less separate faculties helping people know more about life and nature. No doubt, such thinking was also an inspiration to conservative theologians all through the Middle Ages. Plato's highest Form of the Good became god, and the only way to really know what we can know is to mystically grasp it with divine inspiration from god. After all, we cannot know with reason alone even if god exists; faith and god's grace are also necessary for such knowledge. A few centuries later the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, (d. about 270 CE), claimed he had several such experiences, as did many other Christian mystics later on.
Before that, however, Aristotle too added his opinions to the subject of learning. Essentially, he agreed with Plato in rather vague terms, thus showing again his uncertainty about the human psyche; his ideas too were based merely on observation, rather than experimentation. In fact, he looked down on most all kinds of natural knowledge; they simply weren't what educated gentlemen should study. Thus, sense-based faculties like pleasure and sensation were strongest in most people; they ate, drank, and made merry. A nutritive faculty helped shape plants, animals, and people into all their different forms and shapes, and of course people had rational and intuitive faculties so they could see and think about nature's eternal Forms. After all, like his teacher Plato, he too warred against sophist relativism. He was, however, deeply influenced by Democritus, and so built a more moderate learning model than Plato's, one more anchored to our natural world. For Plato all natural knowledge could be nothing more than mere opinion. Even so, Aristotle’s learning model held out the chance for knowing unchanging kinds of natural knowledge, like biological knowledge. In his ethics, however, practical habits began playing a much larger role in human excellence, learning, and education. For example, excellent shoe and clothing shopkeepers taught their sons by having them practice such arts, and the same was true for their political and ethical knowledge; both were learned with faculties of sense and feeling.
In fact, his more moderate naturalistic learning model remained an important part of philosophy even into the 1800s, through even more secular thinkers like John Locke, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and even into Dewey’s day. The model was known as Atomistic psychology. If all of nature is made of atoms, then why shouldn’t human faculties also be pictured as separate mental powers? Later on Dewey called all such learning models ‘spectator’ models of learning. In them one’s contemplative reasoning faculty could grasp and understand nature’s eternal and unchanging Truth. Aristotle added a certain amount of sense experience and an active reasoning faculty to the process, but it too was essentially a spectator theory of learning. One didn’t actively experiment, but rather merely contemplated.
Thus, well after universities were founded in the 1200s, into the 1800s faculties continued to be pictured as more or less separate mental powers within each of us, becoming more excellent with certain kinds of subjects. As we've seen, such a model helped justify what had been happening in universities for centuries, and also in public schools as well. If public school students didn't pay attention to developing their memory faculty with their history lessons, for example, then they might earn a few smacks from the teacher, usually with something smaller than a 2 x 4! After all, it's rather difficult to learn anything when you're unconscious. Such teaching methods no doubt were already thousands of years old even in Plato's day. Athens had jails for those who refused to learn intelligent habits.
Even in Aristotle's day, however, there were some serious problems with such a learning model. For example, could it really produce absolutely certain knowledge, and if so, then why hasn’t such knowledge become known to everyone? Why was there such a variety of True ideas? Also, why was there such a variety and disagreement about exactly how many faculties people have?! Over time the number kept changing, sometimes growing to more than 20 in the 1700s, including faculties like perceiving, remembering, reasoning, willing, imagining, feeling, etc.
Also, modern day naturalists like Dewey asked what practical good did it do people to believe their knowledge about, say, the Form mankind, was really the eternal and absolute Truth? In practice such feelings in fact restricted experimental research into human nature itself, and so slowed progress toward a more verifiable model of learning. He also saw another weakness: If everyone's faculties are set and determined by their eternal and unchanging human Form, then how can we justify educating everyone in public schools; their mental abilities will always be weak, moderate, or superior. As we've seen, such ideas about IQ scores were used to argue against educating everyone as best we could, and even integrating our segregated public schools as well. It would make learning more difficult.
So, in the early 20th century the natural question for liberals like Dewey became: do such learning faculties really exist? Can, say, students learn to think logically without studying math, or build a good memory without studying history? And if so, then shouldn’t a faculty model of learning be replaced by a more organic model based on training childish impulses to become more intelligent habits? Thus, the question became where is the objective evidence such faculties are anything more than just word describing certain skills? And if there's none, then isn't the most important skill of all merely learning how to intelligently experiment and build the character habits people want to learn? Wouldn't we all be a lot better off if our schools did just that, helping make our world a more peaceful, enjoyable, and productive place for everyone?
How To Be Tricked By Language, In One Easy Lesson
Before getting to such testing experiments themselves, I just wanted to mention another way to see the conservative and moderate quest for absolutely certain knowledge! They too can be seen as merely different habits. In fact, today it’s rather common knowledge: people become convinced only their ideas are absolute and eternal Truth merely because that’s the way they were trained to act! After a while such actions begin feeling natural and right; that’s how mentally powerful our actions are. People who, say, actively overeat for years feel it’s best for them, so they keep overeating. Such ideas are what liberal philosophers like Dewey used to argue against a faculty model of learning. The more people felt the power in their own actions, the easier it became to keep improving their actions. So, slowly, beginning in the late 1800s, it became more and more obvious the atomistic faculty model of learning rested merely on words, not reality. People who simply acted as though such ideas were true, began feeling they were true. Those who kept talking about a rational faculty felt there must be one; those who kept going to war felt there must be a strong aggressive faculty, and those who kept eating, drinking and having sex thought there must be a strong nutritive faculty.
In fact since primitive times, people have been creating simple words to stand for very complex natural events; such words made thinking and communicating easier, and thus overcoming obstacles easier too. For example, on a scientific level the word ‘red’ involves a whole chain of physical events, from certain energetic solar photons to optic nerves to vocal chords to practical uses. But simple ideas made practical uses easier: Hand me the red paint will you?
As a result, certain simple words became artfully simplified and solidified, creating the illusion that, say, 'red' really does exist, rather than there being an infinite number of reds. The more people used the simplified word red, the easier it was to feel they named independent, constant, and on-going events. Eventually schools like Plato’s were created for thinkers, military institutions for soldiers, and brothels for most men. Thus, to explain how we can know something is red, we must have an inner power or faculty for seeing colors -- a separate sensing faculty. In reality, however, red is a very complex natural event.
The same can be said about any faculty. We must also have a judging faculty for knowing something's red after seeing it; an imagining faculty to see different ways of using red paint, and so on. In reality, however, no 2 ‘reds’ are ever exactly the same, and both perceiving and judging are merely 2 words describing complex inner organic and interactive feelings. Such simplified thinking and talking habits probably helped Plato and Aristotle to feel there really existed nutritive, aggressive, and rational psychic faculties! Thus, conservative HABITS of talking helped create the feeling for there being eternal and unchanging objects to talk about! In short, it’s most important for young folks to act intelligently, so they can then begin thinking intelligently.
Here’s an example of the way it might have worked in Plato’s thinking. First, his religious training caused him to act as if there really existed spirit-objects, and then years later he began thinking and talking about nature’s eternal Spirit-Ideas; and the more he did, the more he felt he needed to build a learning model for people to know such pure and eternal Ideas. Eventually some Pythagoreans probably helped him believe some mathematical ideas would help prepare people to mentally grasp nature's eternally True objects. After all, 2 + 2 always and forever equals 4, and if our reasoning can discover such eternally certain knowledge, then we must have some reasoning faculties to know it. Plato called the faculty contemplative or intuitive reasoning. With the help of a faculty like intuitive reasoning a small number of dedicated people can discover all the eternal Truths nature has; after all, such eternal Ideas are already buried deep within our psyches, just waiting to be remembered and uncovered! In fact, that learning model was heard even in the 1960s by people like psychologists Timothy Leary; he believed mental health was merely a process of shedding what we think we know in order to see what's been in us all the time. Freud too had a similar psychic model.
It all sounds so logical, doesn't it, and it is IF one first acts as if such eternal and unchanging objects already exist! However, if that feeling is changed to a Behavioral model, then what's most important for learning anything becomes our own intelligent actions here and now! In short, the first model looks to know what already exists, and the second aims at building a new habit and skill with intelligent actions here and now.
To their credit, both Plato and Aristotle admitted such models were merely that, rather tentative suggestions and ideas. They were both humble enough to admit a degree of confusion and uncertainty about those ideas. In fact, Plato would eventually find 6 truly absurd results from using spirit-ideas, mentioned in his dialogue Parmenides. As a result, his whole philosophic picture still has a big question mark hanging over it! However, with the growth of conservatively religious Christianity such humility was relaxed in their quest for complete social control over people; for that they needed to teach people their ideas were the Absolute Truth. For many such Spirit-Ideas thus became part of god’s mind itself, and hence remained unknowable until after death, and making it too another ancient version of a mystery religion. What became important for them was obedience, rather than thinking and reasoning; such faculties cannot help us grasp nature's highest Truth; only faith and god's grace can. Will thus became another faculty; people could will to be good or sinful.
No doubt, if nothing else, for us liberals such ideas are educational. They're examples of how we can be fooled by our own actions, and the words they promote. Faculty ideas were felt to be true merely because that’s the way people used them! People ate, grew, and reproduced so they must have an inner nutritive faculty as its cause; 'psyche' is the Greek word for a self-moving force. In fact, the entire universe is self-moving so it too must have its own psyche; it too must be alive, or so both Plato and Aristotle felt!
What’s more, the words 'nutritive faculty' made it easy and useful to talk and think about a very complex biological process – growth itself. Even death could be easily explained as the stopping of a nutritive psyche or Form. And an emotional faculty too easily described complex physical movements we call feelings and emotions. Aristotle thought that faculty was located in the heart; when one’s heartbeat rose the emotional faculty was said to be its cause, while a rational faculty was said to cause our thinking. Thus, merely because experimental testing ACTIONS weren’t very strong until the past few hundred years, it was easy for ancient, medieval, and even some modern conservative and moderate learning models to continue justifying separate university and public school studies.
Early Modern Philosophy and Faculties
A few more words may be said about our early modern period. Even in the 1700s and 1800s, as Democritus’ atomic model of nature was producing some impressive results in physics and chemistry, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume continued picturing mental faculties as more or less discrete ‘atomic’ and separate mental powers. In his Democracy and Education Dewey mentions Locke as the father of faculty psychology’s modern model. Even for the more liberal-minded Locke, the human mind was a collection of more or less separate ‘faculties’ or powers; also, they could all be strengthened with certain educational exercises and studies. Like Plato, he too pictured mathematics as the best way to strengthen one’s reasoning ‘faculty’, and so such ideas continued being useful to educators; they helped justify a book-centered teaching method. They could tell parents they were helping their children learn to reason better. Indeed, after Descartes, Galileo, and Newton's work revealed seemingly eternal math knowledge, many theologians pictured god itself as merely nature's supreme mathematician.
Then a few decades after Locke, moderate and imaginative Immanuel Kant continued the fight for knowing the certainty of scientific knowledge with another version of faculty psychology. He openly borrowed some of Aristotle's ideas to build yet another version of it. Like Aristotle, Kant wanted modern scientific knowledge to be absolutely certain and eternally True. Why that goal? Well, he felt people simply couldn't live without feeling there existed such knowledge. Skeptic David Hume assumed all we can know are our ideas and sensations, but even he had his doubts people could live in such a small and narrow psychic world. And besides, Kant's quest for certainty was much stronger; he wanted scientific ideas too to be absolutely certain, and so he too built a version of Aristotelian faculty psychology. He pictured inbuilt mental faculties as automatically able to know certain and eternal natural scientific Truth merely with one's reasoning faculty. He felt Newton's laws of physics were the Truth, so he said Newton's assumptions about matter, time, and space being constant and eternal were guaranteed by our own inbuilt constant and eternal mental faculties! It was yet another example of how even learned and educated philosophers are human, all too human!
Kant's faculty model of learning thus made it possible to feel certain scientific ideas too were eternal Truth. He said the human mind's inbuilt faculties automatically arrange chaotic natural events to know scientific certainties, like the constancy of matter, time, and space. In other words, our eternal and constant inbuilt mental faculties of space and time are constantly organizing our experiences to see natural space and time for what they exactly and eternally are – unchanging and eternal events. Like Newton, Kant too merely assumed both space and time aren't relative at all, but constant and unchanging, thus satisfying his need to discover absolutely certain scientific Truth. One example was the so-called Law of Conservation of Matter. One might even compare the long quest for such secular truth by moderate thinkers like Locke and Kant to the conservative religious quest for salvation; until quite recently both quests have remained quite strong in Western civilization. Einstein helped proved matter is not conserved, but rather is continually being converted into energy in the stars.
Since Kant, science itself has undergone a major revolution about such ideas and assumptions, and, once again, the results in action have proved disappointing to both conservatives and moderates. In the late 1800s experiments began challenging Newton's assumptions about matter, time, and space being unchanging and eternal. With actual experimentation it turned out none of them is constant and unchanging, but rather change and vary with gravity and speed. For example, the faster one goes the more time slows down; astronauts thus age less when they're shot into space than people on earth. Even bus and car riders age more slowly than pedestrians! And the larger an object is, the more it warps and bends the space around it. Thus, in 1905 Albert Einstein merely assumed the speed of light was a constant, and thus made Relativity physics better agree with more accurate experimental results. And what’s more, shortly after that other experiments in the early 1920s showed Kant’s faculty model of learning was equally questionable. Even anthropologists gathered evidence against Kant’s faculty ideas as they learned about primitive ideas of cause and effect. Kant said cause-and-effect was another human faculty, but for primitive peoples, when 2 objects were merely close to each other, that was enough to prove cause and effect. If, say, someone whistled while a rabbit ran past, then primitives often thought mere whistling caused the rabbit’s appearance! And if not, then some spirit must have caused something else to happen.
In the late 1800s psychology was becoming more objective and experimental. It started in Germany, but Dewey’s fellow pragmatic philosopher-friend William James quickly brought such a testing art to America. Before long its results too began challenging a faculty model of learning. Dewey and many others then used such results to build the first Behavioral models of learning, based not on eternal faculties, but rather on organic and body-mind habits and impulses.
Thus, a more liberal learning model was built to better reflect experimental evidence, and Dewey helped build it. As America's Progressive Education Movement was gaining some impressive democratic reforms, a much different education model became based on student needs and also giving students more of a democratic choice about learning useful skills and knowledge. Little wonder conservatives and moderates became very eager to discredit such a model. In the 1950s they persuaded President Eisenhower to speak against it, and even naming Dewey himself as the main cause for its growth. After all, down through history conservatives and moderates have encouraged little or no democratic habits to grow! So, with the Cold War conservatives felt they needed students who knew how to take orders and learn what they were told to learn. Thus, schools should remain book-centered and students should remain obedient to their teachers, rather than learning how to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Then, in the 1960s, the military draft and Vietnam began taking advantage of such habits.
Let The Experiments Begin!
Never in the entire history of Western philosophy or education had its conservative 'faculty' ideas been tested like they were in the early 1920s. Almost no one, for example, had challenged the traditional assumptions about how, say, Latin and mathematics were best for strengthening students' reasoning faculty. Medieval schools began using that idea and, like any routine habit, it became propulsive and unquestioned until the US Progressive democratic movement began challenging all such feudalistic thinking and acting.
If education was to become more democratic for everyone, and make all students more independent, rather than passively obedient, then the old idea about faculties needed to be challenged with real objective evidence. If psychic faculties really existed, then where was the objective evidence? So, some liberal psychologists began testing the idea. Even before it was tested, Dewey, psychology professor John Watson, and even Jean Rousseau in the 1700s pictured learning as an organic, holistic, and interconnected process of growth, using the entire body-mind, rather than merely separate mental faculties. They already knew, say, 9 year olds could learn to reason just from practicing their building skills.
Eventually psychologist Edward Thorndike built a test for faculty psychology; he was one of Dewey’s colleagues at Columbia. In other words, not even 100 years ago was the whole idea of faculty learning actually tested; most everyone from Plato to Dewey simply assumed it was true; that’s how new experimental testing still is, even at the scholarly university level.
Thorndike put together a very interesting experiment, not with lab rats but with real students. The assumption he tested was Locke’s assumption: mathematics best strengthens a reasoning faculty. If it was true, then students who had learned little or no mathematics simply wouldn’t be able to reason as well as those students who had learned more mathematics; isn't logic wonderful?
So he simply took 2 groups of young students with roughly the same intelligence, allowed one group to study lots of math while the other group didn’t. Then after a few years he tested both groups for their reasoning abilities. To make a long story short, he found BOTH groups scored about the same in reasoning ability! In other words, math work wasn’t the only way students became better at reasoning! What he did find was reasoning skills for both groups increased no matter what they studied! In short, he simply found no objective evidence for a separate reasoning faculty best improved only with math studies.
To say the least, with such experiments faculty psychology itself became a faulty psychology, and that, in turn, cast some serious doubt over the entire conservative book-centered learning model. At least, intelligent activity was as just as effective a teacher as book-learning, and in fact proved to be a better teacher as well! (See Section 31 The Eight Year Study) Thorndike found reasoning as a separate mental faculty was in fact a myth used mainly to justify teaching certain subjects. Can you imagine? I don't know about you, but to me such experiments are worth their weight in educational gold. How radical was it? Well, it proved the entire fixed and ‘concrete’ mathematics program for almost all public education was unnecessary for teaching students how to reason! What it did, however, was create jobs for many students who had gone to college and studied mathematics, or history, or English, or science, and so on. What’s more, other experiments have also confirmed Thorndike’s results. In other words, what’re most important for educational excellence are intelligent student activities, not studying just one subject! As we saw earlier, all important knowledge and skills can be learned from any starting point whatsoever! Even cooking and gardening can increase a person’s reasoning abilities, and Dewey himself agreed! In fact, such knowledge was much more useful after graduation for helping students find work and make some honest money.
What Is Excellent Education?
Since Thorndike's experiment and Dewey’s work another educational option has become a reality. Showing faculties were just an idea provided real scientific justification for liberals like Dewey to feel more confidence about making schools more active, constructive, and socially oriented places to learn. In fact, keeping a book-centered model of learning merely kept students undereducated and unintelligent about the adult world around them, and how to live successfully within it! No one set of book subjects guaranteed educational excellence, so why shouldn’t a student’s own active and experimental learning needs and wants play a major role in our public schools, rather than keeping students passively working at their desks for 12 years? At best such conservative schools were based on a refuted learning model. To liberals like Dewey the faculty assumption was just another way of justifying conservative dualistic pictures of human nature, where constant and unchanging mental faculties were merely assumed to regulate and control our thinking. And in philosophy, a faculty psychology was useful for believing it’s possible to know absolutely certain objects because they simply must exist! Even moderate modern philosophers like Kant wanted to find absolutely certain knowledge, and so he built a psychological model to produce such results.
How far was Dewey prepared to go in schools with an organic Behavioral model of learning? He believed even the habit-art of doing laundry, if taught intelligently and thoughtfully, would be even more educational than merely reading about clothing care, design, hydrology, and ecology! And no doubt, for many young students, school and learning would be become much more fun too. After all, for billions of years nature has been helping design creatures to act intelligently, rather than just think intelligently. As a result, learning excellence depends on how ideas and skills are actively taught, not on how many books students have redd.
To say the least, then, the new educational possibilities caused by Thorndike’s experiment were revolutionary. And with Dewey’s help progressive schools reached their zenith in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, with school districts around the country experimenting with a host of more active ways of teaching children, centered on nurturing student needs, rather than business, military, and bookmaker needs. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is today millions of people continue believing only conservative book-centered schools are best for learning anything, or at least most things. It’s like my generation of book-centered Baby Boomers has remained almost totally disconnected from all liberal education ideas. As a result, within the last 20 years it’s become easy to convince people they should support book-centered Charter schools as a better learning alternative! That idea, however, is turning out to be merely another weak education reform.
We liberals continue asking: If school principals and many teachers have known these things for some seventy years now, then why do we still have laws fixing what subjects must be taught? No doubt, it certainly looks as if most people have continued being distracted from learning more about progressive kinds of education; for thousands of years war has been a continuing distraction, and continues to this day! More than 25% of the 20th century was devoted to war and helping kill more people than all other centuries combined!
What’s more, over the past 40 years feudalistic economics has continued distracting people from learning better ways of improving their own neighborhood schools. As prices have kept rising and wages have remained flat, now both husband and wife have often gone to work to make the same money only one person made before that time. Except for the wealthy, the stay-at-home wife has become almost extinct. Also, business deregulation since the late 1990s has recently wreaked economic chaos around the world, as did 2 unfunded Republican wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! And as if those events weren’t distracting enough, conservative Republicans in Congress continue lecturing us about our national debt, and how food stamps for the poor should be cut back while the upper class continues raking in more money than ever, and thus continues distracting peoples’ attention and funds from meaningful school reform.
In short, we Deweyan liberals say it is time to start transforming our monastery-like public schools into places where students start actively learning intelligent character habits as well as useful business skills. Our business community needs to become better connected to our schools. Most students today continue disliking their book-centered schools, but what power do they have to make any improvement? They too don't know about other kinds of educational models, much less how to actually start building such schools. As a result, children either stay in a conservative school, or drop out.
These kinds of education problems aren’t just in the US either. A recent article in the Washington Post by Valerie Strauss and Yong Zhao (China’s 10 New and Surprising School Reform Rules) describes how Chinese officials have begun experimenting with making education less book-and-test oriented. For us liberal Deweyans that’s definitely a small baby-step in the right direction, but I for one am not very hopeful it will go any further. How far can they go with such reforms when their undemocratic and feudalistic political system must be maintained as much as possible? Little wonder the article mentions nothing about character development, student choice, democratic freedom, or active community learning projects. No doubt, if both Chinese and Americans knew more about liberal models of education, more people would be helping make their public schools more socially useful and enjoyable places for students to be. How many computer, metal, carpentry, plumbing, gardening and plant nursery shops can we build, where learning becomes what it is in the adult world – activity based?
What’s stopping such work? In some places such ideas are growing. Here in Los Angeles, for example, more schools are specializing in what they teach. For example, a new performing arts high school has just opened, where students interested in developing their performing skills can actively learn about them; in the entertainment capital of the world it certainly makes sense. And there are other kinds of so-called magnate schools, for medicine, and of course vocational schools as well. But how many millions of young folks are still wasting years in our public schools learning more and more book-facts; even the learning tablets they’re sometimes given are often used to play games, rather than answer their questions. How many minority students, for example, could begin seeing how intelligent, constructive, and inventive schools can be while studying the art of basketball, or any sport? No doubt, even sports can be the doorway to learning about character excellence if students emotionally commit to such studies. Most of our public schools today seem to ignore such commitment.
As we saw earlier, conservatives know full well how dangerous to their feudalistic social and economic power such democratic schools can be. What other reason could there be for their passing such laws like No Child Left Behind, or Common Core learning laws? Both keep students anchored to book-facts more than ever, and thus keep discriminating against minorities where book-learning habits aren’t celebrated! As a result, school subjects have remained basically frozen for over 100 years, in effect chaining young folks like slaves to learning mostly academic trivia, which, large numbers of students continue rejecting. It sounds like we the people have continued treating ourselves like our own worst enemy by allowing conservative politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, to force a now old and outdated learning model on everyone! What is the difference between a pope dictating what Catholics should learn, and conservative educational bureaucrats dictating what students should learn? None, as far as I can see. What about you?
Bottom line: Educational excellence, like charity, can begin in one’s own neighborhood, but only if parents and children know more about liberal kinds of learning excellence. The more parents start practicing the art of training their children before they even go to school, and lovingly teach them what intelligent character arts and creative experimental actions feel like, then the easier it becomes to build such schools. Isn’t logic wonderful?
Conservative public school teachers may keep ignoring liberal kinds of improvements, and even encourage their unions to keep paying politicians to create more ‘concrete’ educational ‘red tape’, but they can’t stop parents from helping their children learn to constructively experiment with all kinds of different building and protest projects, and in the process keep learning more useful mathematical, scientific, historical, and even healthful exercise and diet habits. After all, game makers already know how to keep young people playing their electronic games, and also taking more money from kids too! How many great inventors and scientists started taking things apart and putting them back together again when they were children? Galileo and Edison were just 2 of them.
Obviously the more people practice such liberal learning habits, the more their meanings and ideas organically grow in one’s entire body-mind. It’s only the way animals have been educating themselves for at least the last 600 million years, so if nothing else nature is on our side too! Almost certainly, the first little stone tool maker had experimented with using cutting tools before it actually was inspired to build such a tool. Its creative skill thus depended on its earlier work experience. New, inventive, and constructive impulses often depend on active practice, and it can help keep deepening a person’s meanings and feelings all through life.
Finally, for us Deweyan liberals all mental ‘faculties’, or habits, grow as an organic body-mind unit, rather than as separate skills. Learning how to build flower planters, for example, helps build one’s constructive, thinking, talking, and helpful character habits. It’s one thing to sit at a desk and mechanically memorize how to spell the word ‘sprint’ on a test, but when the habit-art of sprinting begins actively growing, then so many other possible feelings and ideas begin growing as well. In that situation, active sprinting can also help improve health, better organize thinking by keeping a record of its results, build confidence in achieving goals in a step-by-step process, and a whole host of other intelligent feelings and ideas. And when students work cooperatively with students, they can also begin learning encouragement skills as well. As any psychologist knows, pleasant rewards are the best learning tools for building any habit-art.
With such actively thoughtful and creative experiments, students can not only learn better the inner feelings of sprinting, but 2 more important results as well. For one thing, it better prepares students to keep experimenting, and it also teaches how to intelligently control their own growth and learning. Such intelligent results are indeed what help shape our liberal Form of Educational Excellence.
29. CURIOSITY AND CREATIVITY
The Quest for Certainty and Social Power Helped Cripple Such Valuable Learning Habits
Just like any excellent habit-art, intelligent curiosity and creativity remain very much a challenge for everyone, especially in today's more democratic, scientific, and corporate world. New challenges continually grow, and new solutions are called for. However, for much of our history our conservative public schools have ignored formally teaching those 2 skills, even though the whole history of science and new inventions are the direct result of curious question-asking and creative testing. Most all children simply aren't given much time or encouragement to actively build and strengthen such important habits, and thus graduate being much less prepared for the modern challenges growing all around them. It's not difficult to see why. Our conservative public schools continue teaching students the book-facts they often feel are just as true as medieval schools taught religious ideas. Today, students are simply told what to read and they're also given the questions to ask. When is the last time a teacher or a book asked students to think of their own questions to ask and answer and thus start building their own curiosity skills?
In fact, teaching young folks to be curious and creative has been downplayed for most of human history. In the primitive world, for example, curiosity and creativity focused mainly on occasionally building a new hunting tool or creating a new spirit-rituals to help make life easier and less stressful. Many felt such spirits absolutely existed and were thus the best way to produce any kind of satisfaction. Thus, a whole host of religious rituals were built over the span of 50,000 years. Some American tribes even created very painful rituals, hoping their Great Spirit would take pity on them and give them what they wanted; Sitting Bull himself went through such rituals during the US-Indian wars in the 1800s.
In ancient Greece we've seen how conservative Plato wanted very much to show liberals, like Protagoras, people could know absolutely certain knowledge, and so committing himself emotionally and intellectually to that goal. Thus his curious and creative energies were restricted to that field of inquiry. For people like him, most everyone's opinions about natural knowledge were hopelessly less than nature's absolute Truth, and so were really useless for knowing such Truth. As a result of that quest for certainty, however, acting curious and creative about learning natural kinds of knowledge were generally ignored, even though they are our most liberating kinds of knowledge.
Plato felt all natural knowledge was second rate, at best, so why bother learning such habits like curiosity and creative testing? Why not instead focus on contemplating eternal truths and objects, and testing those kinds of ideas? As a result, curious question-asking and testing natural ideas dwindled to almost nothing throughout the Middle Ages. Conservative religious leaders felt god had already revealed the Truth to them, and so why be curious and creative with any kind of natural knowledge? It could lead to more sin, pride, and depravity. Thus, creative testing of ideas was reduced to making, say, a new ritual form of praying, rather than creatively experimenting to actually learn how natural objects move and can be used to make life safer and more secure. Natural kinds of practical knowledge, then, remained buried in nature, and so were ignored, except maybe to earn a living and redeem one's soul from sin. In such a world, curious question-asking and creative testing skills were generally ignored for thousands of years.
Plato's one book about nature, Timaeus, was full of poetic spirit-myths and ideas, and as a result remained very popular in the Middle Ages. For him, and many conservatives after him, natural kinds of knowledge simply weren't as certain as spirit-based ideas. Only eternal objects could produce eternal Truth, and only that kind of knowledge was most useful for living in an always changing world. So, what need has anyone for curious question-asking or creative testing? One needs other learning tools like faith, acceptance, submission, and intuitive reasoning.
All through the Middle Ages Christians almost completely ignored creative and curious impulses about our natural world and its many liberating ideas. Indeed, acting curious about nature and human nature, as well as creatively testing ideas about those ideas, was not only not wanted, but actively discouraged with churchmen like Tertullian, Augustine, Benedict, and mystics like Bernard of Clairveaux (d. 1153) and Meister Eckhart (d. 1327?) As a result, the main educational challenge became merely teaching young folks more religious habits while political and religious leaders were to be unquestioningly obeyed.
Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas too continued acting as if Spirit-Objects were nature's most perfect objects and knowledge about them was absolute Truth. In the 1200s, Aquinas wrote more about angels than he did about physics. After all, why be curious or creative about a nature that's set and the same for all eternity? Life itself was seen as basically a quick boat ride through an illusion and dream, lasting some 40 or 50 years if you were lucky. Thus, only certain and True religious rituals were worth knowing and practicing; why be curious and creative when the eternal Truth was already known?
After 1,000 CE, however, little questions about nature began growing for more and more monks, and so towards the end of the Middle Ages did a more naturalistic curiosity and creativity become 2 excellent habit-arts. In the 1200s Franciscans like Roger Bacon became much more curious about natural knowledge and thus started asking more questions, like what are rainbows and do they have a natural cause? Such curious questions about our natural world -- the only world we can be surest about -- thus helped people begin creatively testing their old routine religious ideas about nature, and in turn asking more curious testing questions as well. Church conservatives of course knew how dangerous those kinds of habit-arts were to their power, and so in the 1200s the Inquisition was created, along with a number of Crusades to keep people tied to their religious habits. They wanted the old status quo world of obedient followers, rather than curious and creative question-askers. In fact, today, in some of the Islamic world, conservatives are physically attacking young women for even going to school, much less opening challenging the social status quo!
If anyone still doubts the great power in routine habitual energies formed to believe eternal Truth is already known, then one need look no further than our own Western philosophic history. Only a handful of curious and creative people helped build that history while most everyone else was left uneducated and undereducated. Feudalistic leaders knew their routine habits would keep producing routine thinking and feelings, and thus weaken the will to wonder and ask how nature really works, and how can we use its knowledge to creatively improve life here and now.
Feelings about one's religious knowledge being absolutely certain thus continued neglecting habits of curiosity and creativity. After all, people in power had learned thousands of years ago, the more a habit is practiced, the more difficult it becomes to change it. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for example, many conservatives around the nation felt the government was actually attacking them just because they wanted their old segregation habits to stay in place, especially in their public schools. America's first member of baseball's Hall of Fame, Ty Cobb, was one such racist. For them, being curious about education and wanting creatively to make it more democratic and fair were dangerous ideas; for many god had created the races separate and so they should remain so. After all, many of the nation's founders themselves were slave owners who didn't practice democratic equal rights, so why should they? For years violence was a common result of such ideas. And of course to keep their votes, conservative Republicans often told people they were really being attacked by liberal communists in the government! Many felt the Civil Rights Act of 1964 proved that was the situation. Liberals were out to get them and so they should vote Republican; they told them their ideas were in fact the Truth.
Even today, many of our conservative book-centered public schools don't encourage students to ask meaningful questions about what's going on in their own neighborhoods. As a result, practical habits of curious question-asking, and creative testing continue remaining weak and ineffective, especially political and economic kinds of questions! For conservatives, the less people ask such questions, the better and more secure life remains for them. So, today even secular subjects like physics, chemistry, and biology are normally taught as if their facts are the same as absolute religious Truth; everyone must simply learn and accept such truth, rather than learn to act curiously and then creatively test their ideas.
As a result, curious question-asking and creative testing habits are still all but ignored in our public schools. Most students are merely required to read and memorize facts, as if their textbooks were now an educational Bible whose knowledge is worth knowing because it makes them a well-rounded person! In truth, however, not teaching such habits merely helps keep our medieval economic, religious, and political institutions in place. For over 2,000 years conservative forms of education have generally kept students from practicing any kind of naturalistic curiosity and creativity about democratic ideas like equality. Labor union history is another grim tale of how conservatives are still fighting their power to this day, even though profit-obsessed corporate CEOs continue making millions every year. Since Plato’s day children were mostly taught to merely accept what they were told and obey their social leaders, and in much of the world today it's still taught. The modern world's motto might well still be: vote for the totalitarian of your choice. In the Muslim world we have religious totalitarians; in China and Russia we have political totalitarians, and in the so-called developed world like the US, we have economic totalitarians! In the US about 3 million wealthy people continue controlling the economic and political systems.
Conservative schools continue teaching book-facts as if they are the absolute Truth. Chemistry often means learning how to balance atomic equations exactly, how to read the periodic chart of eternal atomic elements, and how to conduct simple experiments verifying chemical reactions. Curious question-asking and creative testing of even local water sources and lake conditions, to see how polluted they are, is generally ignored. Curiosity even about their student cafeteria food is generally ignored; merely accept it and get to your next class. Is it any wonder we continue seeing alarming signs of obesity in our public schools with excessive fatty, salty, and sugary foods?
What's more, formally teaching ethical curiosity about what is excellent behavior in a democracy is equally ignored in conservative classrooms. What is excellent and healthy behavior, and how do my parents' actions compare to those ideas? How can we expect any kind of social progress without such knowledge? Many young folks leave school with weak ideas about behavioral curiosity and ethical excellence. Not creatively experimenting with such useful questions is thus another weak result of a conservative Platonic-like idea-based education. I don’t know about you, but my book-centered secular education left me feeling my knowledge was just as absolutely certain as Plato’s Spirit-Ideas felt to him. So, I too remained not at all curious about learning what habits can produce more healthful results, or even how to keep asking intelligent questions and keep testing ideas experimentally. I went through college with some of the worst diet habits on the planet. Only after leaving my monastery-like schools, reading more of Dewey's educational thoughts, and of course getting out into the world to actively experiment, did I consciously start building my curious question-asking and creative testing skills.
Deweyan Liberals Are Liberated From The Quest for Certainty
For Dewey, both curiosity and creativity can best start growing with the simple art of question-asking! A good question is one you don't already know the answer to! Such questions are thus an active form of curiosity; only creatively finding reliable answers can satisfy good questions. Children go through a natural burst of curious question-asking even before they start school, and so helpful parents and teachers can show them how important that habit-art is, and how to use it to keep strengthening their own curious question-asking and creative testing skills. Intelligent question-asking encourages students of all ages to keep learning more about what's going on in their world, and also how they might creatively help improve it. In short, experimenting with questions helps young folks focus their energies onto both knowing and improving their own little piece of the natural world. Without consciously asking good questions and creatively testing ideas, people sink to the subconscious level of routine trial-and-error living other animals have been using for at least the last 600 million years, give or take a day or two!
For Dewey such curious and creative skills are the bedrock of democracy itself. Without people consciously practicing such habits, democracy itself is hardly more than a word! Is it any wonder democracy first evolved in a Greek culture where curious question-asking and reasoning was almost a mania as boatloads of Greeks sailed out into the world to build more colonies? Questions even abound in page after page of Plato's and Aristotle's writings. Democrats like Democritus and Protagoras too encouraged question-asking of their politicians: what did they do with public money and power; and how honest were they with their answers? Even conservatives and moderates like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were curious and thus creative about philosophic ideas themselves, often changing old definitions to meet the new liberal challenges to their most cherished ideas, like eternal and constant Truth. Again, conservative Plato's political pictures are good examples is his creative habit-art. Assuming Spirit-Ideas could be known only by a few people helped him justify anti-democratic political models, just as not knowing about such objects helped liberals like Protagoras write laws for democratic city-states.
Thus, the link between curious question-asking and democratic politics was established thousands of years ago. For much of his life Plato felt only those few who were curious about such Spirit-Objects should be given political power, as if only they could know what was best for everyone else! Only such people who had eternal and constant Truth should be trusted with absolute political power in all city-states. And such ideas formed the philosophic basis for the entire conservative feudalistic medieval period. Thus, with our educational ideas of curiosity and creativity, we Deweyan liberals are challenging the entire 2,000 year history of Western education!
Ancient question-asking almost demanded some degree of creative thinking, and that situation remains true even today, no matter what political assumptions one makes. Curious and creatively inventive mathematicians in Alexandria, for example, soon created ways of accurately measuring the earth, moon, and sun's size, as well as their distances, and thus challenged all conservative ideas about they being controlled by spirits, or were representations of spirits. Plato thought the sun was proof of there being one absolute and eternal Spirit-Object. What's more, those Alexandrian mathematicians knew their results weren't absolute Truth, but it was the best they could do with their crude measuring tools and math languages.
For thousands of years curiosity and creativity about the natural world was sucked out of peoples' psyches with the idea of knowing absolute Truth, like a vampire keeps victims weak and obedient by sucking their blood. That may sound like a hostile comparison, but in a way it's true on a psychic and behavioral level! After all, peoples' psychic energies are intimately interactive with their physical energies; a lazy mind helps create a lazy body, just as an obedient body helps create an obedient mind! Even Plato saw how such undemocratic ideas worked in places like Sparta, Crete, and Egypt; in them, a lack of curiosity and creativity helped keep people in their social classes all through life, even political leaders.
Socrates was one of the most curious of all Greeks; he kept asking people questions about their ideas and feelings, and was happy to creatively test their ideas with more questions, to see what results they produced. If they produced a logically absurd result, then he asked for another definition of some idea, like friendship, courage, or justice. Sadly, however, his student Plato didn't question many of his basic assumptions about there being such eternally true definitions until much later in life, and even then creatively tried to build better definitions for his ideas, rather than experiment with different ideas. Being on a quest for nature's absolutely certain Spirit-Truth helped closed off his naturalistic thinking and question-asking. He too continued ignoring asking questions about natural kinds of knowledge outside his psychic bubble.
Believe it or not we are still just beginning to teach such question-asking habit-arts today, especially on our public media stages, where the most serious questions are being asked of our politicians and about world affairs. What are our wealthy and political classes doing, and how might they be more creatively controlled for the public good? We Deweyans say such useful habit-arts should continue growing in more of our public schools, where students are encouraged to grow their curiosity skills with good questions and creative answers. What are our elected officials doing with their time, how much power does the wealthy class have over them, and what can we do to make our schools better places to learn what excellence means in a democratic society?
No doubt, our many new communication tools like the Internet are helping millions of people know more about what's going on in the world, and thus helping answer their questions, but such curious and creative habits are still too weak in many US public schools, not to mention those around the world. In conservative book-oriented public schools today children are still taught to feel teachers have absolute knowledge and their job is merely to continue sitting quietly and absorbing its ideas, much like monks and nuns did all during the Middle Ages. Just as medieval abbots and mother-superiors controlled what their members did and redd, so too many conservative book-centered public schools still continue ignoring the important democratic habit-arts of curious question-asking and creatively testing ideas.
We continue seeing the social results of such schools. Millions of people continue ignoring the democratic voting power they have, and merely accept the status quo as natural and normal! It's a natural result when a question-asking skills remains weak and unimportant. Barely 50% of people aren't at all curious about political and economic actions, and yet those very kinds of actions help create the world we all live in. Millions don't even vote in national elections, much less in off-year elections, and few aren't very curious about what political leaders are doing with their money the rest of the time. Such weak habits are, in fact, poison to a democracy; they merely empower those with power to keep electing those who will protect their interests, as well as work to keep increasing it. Thus feudalistic institutions continue on. Our recent deep economic recession and increased unemployment is simply more proof of those weak habits.
Recently, a gang of local Southern Californian politicians in the city of Bell found it relatively easy to keep taking more taxpayer money simply because people weren't curious about what they were doing. For such people out of sight politicians meant out of mind politicians! Even when curious newspaper people expose such criminal actions, politicians are often re-elected with no questions asked. Such ignoring of important actions here and now continues being fostered in many of our own conservative book-oriented public schools. Laws like No Child Left Behind are thus be easily passed, making teaching such important habits even more difficult; teaching jobs themselves are jeopardized by not teaching more and more book-facts. And so feudalistic actions on an economic and political level continue making life easy for our wealthy upper class and ever-more dangerous and stressful for most everyone else! Habits of unquestioning obedience to learning more book-facts help keep the social and political status-quo in place, and have thus been important for undemocratic conservatives like Plato since ancient times! Without the help of more liberal public schools, where questions are encouraged on a daily basis, such status-quo habits are not easily improved with curious question-asking and creative answering skills.
Who’s Curious to Lean More?
Today, one of liberal education’s main goals is thus celebrating students becoming more actively curious and creative about our natural world; it’s another reason we want more active learning experiences in our public schools. They help create more curiosity and creativity. For us Deweyan liberals, such habit-arts remain educationally excellent. More than anything else they help liberate students of all ages from ancient and medieval habit-arts of meek acceptance and obedience -- the great virtues of the masses in the ancient and medieval worlds. Curiosity and creative testing not only help keep weakening the narrow conservative and moderate quest for absolute Truth, but for absolute power as well.
In that process of curious question-asking, something else of great human benefit can also happen: People begin seeing how artificial many of their traditional ideas about people really are. The more people are seen as all having to cope with challenges, the easier it becomes to see all people as liberal Democritus and Protagoras saw them in ancient Greece, as merely people, rather than rulers or priests or slaves! We’re all people! And the more such ideas grow, the more democracy and equal rights grow too. Like them, modern liberals can use their questions to see all people merely have different kinds of habits, rather than some knowing eternal truth and everyone else as wrong and misguided.
With curious question-asking they can thus begin seeing all people as deserving of equal rights and freedoms, and begin celebrating, or at least respecting, all peaceful and law-abiding people! After all, scientific question-asking tells us all humans are part of the same species and family, and therefore deserve the same rights and opportunities as anyone else. Why should anyone tolerate wealthy folks continuing to use their power to keep control of our politicians and law-making power? In short, curious question-asking helped modern liberals like Dewey and millions of other people see all people as merely human. That too can be another result of teaching skills of curiosity and creativity in our public schools. Such skills keep widening our own little narrow spheres of thinking and feeling. Without such skills, people tend to remain in their own routine childhood psychic bubbles. In general, it's yet another result of believing only our own habits reflect eternally unchanging Truth! Such habits produced satisfying feelings in a dangerous world where scientific knowledge was almost non-existent. With uncurious habits it was easy for people to continue allowing people to be divided into good and evil categories; those with, say, different sexual habits are wrong, and so they shouldn't have equal rights. So, why shouldn't students be encouraged in 1st grade to start asking questions about the economy and job possibilities, so by the time they graduate they'll have the basic skills and habits needed to enter the workforce and be a productive member of society?
For Dewey such questions helped liberate students from their unintelligent routine habits. For him any kind of lawful and honest work was a legitimate subject for curious, active, useful, constructive, creative, and intelligent learning. For example, when first graders are encouraged to act curiously and ask questions like what flowers would be best to help improve their own school grounds, any public spaces, or even their own homes and daycare centers, and then creatively test their ideas by growing the flowers and putting them into such spaces, that’s the best kind of knowledge to have. It is based on real feelings rather than merely words. Such active and intelligent work nurtures both curiosity and creative independent thinking and testing, as well as empowers students to feel they have the right to guide their own lives and keep improving it as well. In short, it liberates students to become what they and their parents think is best.
As many parents already know, their questions and positive encouragements can easily teach children how to become more curious, and also more creative, and even more so if they’re allowed to work with older students. Sometimes two heads are better than one, especially when one has more intelligent experience than the other. So again, where else but in our public schools are students actively segregated and isolated by age and different classes? I suppose it’s a natural tendency when education is book-centered, and everyone is expected to learn the same facts; it makes teaching much easier. But who are our public schools built for, teachers, or students? Being free to work and associate with students of different ages and abilities would help make school more natural places of learning, as would letting go of the standardized testing mania affecting so many parents. In fact, age segregation encourages immature habits to continue on. Just like at home while working with older caring parents, schools too can be even more educational when younger students get to work with older students on useful projects. And perhaps best of all, it would become easier to build student habit-arts of caring about and helping those less educated?
Feeling how knowledge excellence is the result of an active building process, energized with curious questions and creative testing, can even be made into an educational game. The process can start with a kind of game called ‘When Does Life Get Better'? Instead of testing students for finding and memorizing information in a book, teachers and parents can help strengthen imaginative and creative character habit-arts with such a game. It's much more enjoyable for active learning students than the usual book work. What's more, in that game students needn’t fear failure for suggesting answers; the only failure is not suggesting anything. Even humorous answers can be appreciated. For example, wouldn't life get better when ... everyone moves to Saturn? It may not make logical sense, but at least it's imaginative and humorous. Wouldn't such games help make school itself more enjoyable and fun? Thus students are free to offer any ideas as long as they think it would make life better; it's a kind of educational free-association game. And after hearing other suggestions, students’ critical thinking skills could be improved by talking about their possible good and bad results. Wouldn't that be an enjoyable way to start teaching any active learning project?
One sect of Zen Buddhists play a similar creative game teaching young students how ideas should be tested actively, rather than just thought about logically. Answering what are called koans thus encourages a playful and active learning habit, rather than just more logical thinking. How does that happen? Well, the koan is an illogical question. The master asks students a logically absurd question whose answer must be ACTIVELY DEMONSTRATED, rather than merely talked about. Perhaps the most famous one may be 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' Another one is 'What did Buddha’s face look like before he was born?'
Students usually meditate about the question, wondering how such a sound or face could possibly be defined and talked about. After a while the novice returns to the master to give his answer, but each verbal answer is rejected, until finally the student, with feeling, tries DEMONSTRATING the sound of one hand clapping, or how someone looks before birth. It's an exercise in teaching one important idea: logic and thinking have their limits for building real knowledge, beyond which experimental actions and feelings take over, much like scientists actively test their ideas. It’s a lesson Plato never seems to have learned; both he and Aristotle said mere reasoning is the learning method. In short, the habit-art of actively answering one's curious questions starts producing more personal power and freedom, rather than merely knowing more and more soon-forgotten, academically trivial ideas. The testing of creative ideas needs to be actively and intelligently demonstrated in liberal schools where experimental learning is the most important habit-art to teach. For Dewey, then, when someone knows how to build something, then they have the best knowledge available.
What is the sound of creative experimentation? What did scientific truth look like to a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex 75 million years ago? What will truth be 500 centuries from now? How does the idea of testing creative opinions taste? What fragrance does truth have? How did the sensuous feel of life look to our 400 million year old Devonian lung-fish ancestors? What kind of logic did 1 billion year old plants practice? What is the logic of attention, joy, or happiness? How do truth's causes and results sound? What was the look of safety 250 million years ago, when most animals and plants were becoming extinct? What is justice to one animal that survived—the horseshoe crab? What is the definition of democratic equal rights? And wouldn’t many children’s questions be much more creative and even more entertaining than those?
30. DESIRING TO LEARN
What Should Be Desired?
That question remains important for all of civilized living. Even before cities began growing, for many tens of thousands of years many of our ancestors saw our natural world as a theatre or playground for friendly and unfriendly spirits; such habits are practiced even today. Ancient Japanese Shinto and Chinese Taoist myths said some spirits will be helpful if a person desired the right things and acted properly. Because people sometimes got what they desired, it convinced them they should continue desiring those actions. Enjoyable and satisfying actions thus produced desires for those actions. In fact, throughout the primitive world such spirit-controlling actions became routine desires for most everyone; for many thousands of years desiring them was thought to be best.
However, as we’ve been seeing, a rather dangerous behavioral result was produced: the desire to know more about our natural world was numbed and restricted, and thus restricted the growth of real power to keep improving both ourselves and our world. The more routine such desires and actions became, the less desire there was to actually keep experimenting with nature itself, build better sensing tools like microscopes and telescopes, study nature's movements more carefully, and increase our power to keep improving life. As we’ve been seeing, conservative religious spirit-habits on a quest for absolute Truth helped deaden the will and desire to grow more democratic institutions, and thus make life more satisfying for all law-abiding people. And the more that happened, the easier it was for a few to keep feudal control of economic, educational, and political power.
Today, of course, such body-mind habits are declining rapidly with the growth of modern science and its stronger learning tool of experimental testing, and thus so is the desire to practice spirit-habits. As always new habits grow slowly, even democratic ones, but they are growing and that’s what’s important. Science has begun giving mankind much more control of our ever-changing and dangerous world. And so the question about what we should teach children to desire is also changing; what we should desire has quite recently undergone a fundament shift, from the supernatural to the natural, and from routine habits to science’s experimental habits. And so a major liberal educational challenge today centers around helping students learn to desire intelligent kinds of experimental learning and the challenges it best overcomes. For us liberal Deweyans experimental testing habits and challenges are the most important objects to desire and practice.
Also, because we’re social creatures, desire isn’t just a personal habit; there are also many social reasons for teaching students to desire intelligent actions. Costs of controlling people who don’t practice such peaceful and respectful habits affects all of us in the form of higher taxes. What’s more, those with similar desires often support and promote each other. Thus both liberal and conservative movements grow and dissolve, evolve and change, and, as history teaches us, sometimes become dangerous to those outside the movement. The whole US history of civil rights and slavery is merely one such example. So, again, the educational challenge for us liberals is not only to increase student desire for intelligent actions, but also to know what people are doing with their desires. Are they promoting constructive and productive kinds of activities, or narrow and destructive ones?
Also, another object or goal of liberal education is to teach students to desire their own independent habits of intelligent thinking and acting; democracy works best with more independent people. So, again, we can see more weaknesses of a conservative educational model practically forcing all students to accept one learning model for everyone. The more parents desire that book-centered model, the more difficult it becomes to satisfy a variety of learning needs, especially in cities where a large variety of people and habits live. In them many young folks just don’t have the same desire to sit quietly and learn more book facts. In short, conservative education today, like conservative education for thousands of years, desired everyone to learn the same kinds of habits and desires; social conformity was practically demanded. Today, such educational desires are often justified by saying such knowledge is the only way to get good paying jobs in our technological economy. But how many people really want to spend 15 hours a day working for their money in such jobs?
In a sense, most animals are built by nature to desire routine kinds of safe and satisfying actions. Once a safe and rewarding environment is found, people too normally want and desire to stay there. If it’s relatively safe, people grow enough food, have a family, and stay healthy they feel little need to desire anything else. As history teaches us, seeing improvements is not desired by many. Such was probably the case in the ancient Greek world, where democracy and experimental learning rose to a conscious level of action. True, slavery was a fact of life even during democracy’s height, but some had enough leisure to start asking creative questions about life and nature, and even start creatively testing their secular ideas. In such a different world a liberal model of democratic politics and experimental testing became more desired by many people. The great weakness, of course, lay in their not building public schools where the next generation was easily taught to build such habits, and thus desire more democratic equal rights.
Teaching children to desire such liberal habits remains a genuine challenge to this day. Today many young folks haven’t been encouraged to ask liberal kinds of questions, and so don’t have a very strong desire to ask them or keep experimenting to improve our natural world. How can they desire such important knowledge when they’re all but forbidden to practice such habits? When our conservative schools artificially restrict learning to book-knowledge, it’s almost impossible to teach students to desire to ask questions about what’s going on in their own neighborhoods and cities. Book-learning actions produce book-learning desires, at least for those children whose parents are already encouraging such work. Thus most students continue assuming the work they do should be desired. In fact, such an educational model has been in place for thousands of years. Even in the primitive world there was always a little room to desire learning different habits and desires, but rarely was there even psychic room to desire questioning basic primitive assumptions about life and nature, like the existence of spirits, and thus begin growing more secular kinds of learning skills. Also, constant warfare in both the primitive and civilized worlds kept creating desires for spirit kinds of habits.
For us liberal Deweyans, the truth about desires is already reliably known and tested: all desires grow and strengthen with rewarding and satisfying actions! If an action feels good and worthwhile to a student, then desires grow for that action. The educational challenge, then, is to start teaching children how more rewarding and satisfying it is to practice intelligent actions. As many parents know today, children desire to keep playing electronic games largely because they’re rewarding and satisfying. Such game makers too know, desires are the result of rewarding actions, and so many parents today are challenged to weaken those desires by merely restricting those actions. On a conservative public school level, however, book-centered learning actions have been frozen into law, so to speak, and thus become much more difficult to keep improving with more liberal democratic schools where different learning desires are respected and students are encouraged to intelligently learn what they want to learn. Besides the No Child Left Behind law, there is also in many states a Common Core State Standards model of learning, based again on learning more academic book-facts and skills. To us, more parents need to ask if desiring those kinds of public schools should be desired!
So, once again, we see more basic educational challenges for us liberal democrats. No doubt, they’re not impossible to overcome, but to be overcome and replaced intelligently, more parents, students, and teachers need to be more organized and informed more about liberal models of education. The more they are, the easier it becomes to keep building our progressive movement and working for such improvements. We liberals have a right to make such demands based on the weak, excessive, and unhealthful results of a book-centered education model. As we’re seeing today, more and more children are rejecting that model, sometimes 50% in some cities! They feel their own educational needs just can’t be satisfied in such schools. With today’s new communication tools, students are reading less and less, and instead are texting more and more, and thus desiring to text more and more. What’s more, millions of young folks are not practicing intelligent kinds of habits, and thus not desiring those kinds of actions. How can you desire to act more independently and intelligently when you don’t know what independent and intelligent actions feel like? How can you desire to, say, build a more intelligent diet habit, or drinking habit, when you haven’t felt what such intelligent actions feel like? It would be like asking a life-long Catholic to start practicing only Buddhist habits.
Conservative parents can also be another obstacle to building more liberal schools. No doubt, many of them will say our schools are really preparing their children for the adult world. Many simply don't want their children learning to question anything about the social status quo; they mainly want them to get a well-paying job and start raising a family. Many feel liberal habits are in fact dangerous to learn. In short, they want their children desiring only conservative kinds of actions and results. Well and good, as long as they can make an honest living at it, but many other parents have children who want to keep making our country more democratic and equal for everyone, not just a small minority within the country. After all, how can children without helpful parents ever desire to help those less fortunate when they don’t get to practice those habits in school or at home?
Also, many parents still don't know how to build such democratic desires with democratic actions of respect and equality; many parents believe children should remain dependent and controlled, and so it becomes a challenge educating them as well. Luckily, however, more liberal schools can help overcome all such challenges. No doubt, the more our public schools teach liberal skills, the easier it becomes for parents to learn them as well. Shouldn’t children have the power to ask their disrespectful parents to practice kinder and friendlier actions at home, and then tell them how much they appreciate it when they do? In more liberal schools children too would become teachers, rather than allowing them to stay bored in school or waste too much time playing video games. Everyone needs some diversion or else life becomes distorted, but why let diversions keep students away from learning more intelligent kinds of activities?
Let’s not forget, teachers too have desires, and our current system is seeing many of them losing their desire to teach within a few years. Especially in lower-income schools with diverse learning needs, many young teachers soon learn their book-assignments aren’t as rewarding and satisfying as they hoped they would be. They finally get into a classroom with all their academic knowledge only to learn most children simply don’t need or want to learn such knowledge. They soon learn, expecting children to complete such work is itself unrealistic and too frustrating. Statistics show us about 50% of new teachers lose their desire to teach within 5 years, and that’s not the worst of it. Many of those who do stay soon become administrators or uninspired assignment-giving teachers. As a result, they too soon get bored teaching the same book-facts year after year, and following the same book-centered teaching routine? Think back to how many of your teachers were like that – uninspiring and boring teachers. How many students want to learn facts largely useless in the real world when even teachers often feel bored and uninspired? As life teaches us, many teachers simply want a good pension plan when they retire, so they keep giving assignments and grading papers year after year; one class out, another class in. We liberals say it’s largely the result of a conservative education model based on book facts, rather than respecting active student learning desires. Furthermore, we say the solution to such challenges, or at least the improvement of such results, lies in shifting from a book-centered conservative model to a more liberal student-centered model, start increasing student freedom to learn what they want, and thus increase their desire to say in school and keep learning as much as they can about the job they would like to get when they graduate.
Genuine Praise Increases Desire
Here's another little personal teaching anecdote. Like many teachers, at first I took the “drill sergeant” approach to increasing student desire. Controlling student class disruptions was the first priority. Little did I realize it was based on a medieval psychology: students would keep working if they were afraid of punishment. What’s more, I had never heard one teacher publicly give any student a compliment on their work in my entire public school career! So the atmosphere in my own classes could best be described as early boot camp, reeking of tension and confrontation. Eventually, however, thanks to some of my more enlightened students and my principal, I learned about a more positive approach to increasing student desires with genuine praise for their work.
In a class called Assertive Discipline I learned how praising students for their good work, especially in front of the class, became a much better way for increasing student desire to work. Most students like to please caring adults, so when their work is appreciated it’s much easier to feel proud of themselves and their work, and thus keep working. Who doesn’t like to have their work appreciated? As a result, I learned how to make book-learning more pleasant and satisfying. Compared to my ‘drill sergeant’ method, the classroom atmosphere became as different as night and day. More students seemed happier most of the time, and I too had much more fun teaching.
Slowly, however, as I desired to learn more about education, I began feeling uncomfortable with the entire conservative book-centered model. Today it’s called the Common Core State Standards model. The more I learned more about Dewey’s educational model, the more I felt it was much less than what education could be. What I was teaching them was merely how to pass the next test, or standardized tests. Was that all our schools should be doing? Students were just learning a bunch of ideas, rather than learning how to be more intelligent citizens with excellent character habits. When would they ever need to divide or multiply 2 mixed numbers together? In short, as I was learning how to make students feel good about their work and increase their desire to keep learning, the idea of subject usefulness was becoming a bigger problem for me. Unlike some teachers, I cared about what would happen to students with all their book knowledge after they left school.
As I continued seeing more of Dewey’s liberal educational model, I felt the conservative model I went through was simply not the best. It disrespected human nature too much; it expected too much from students. Based on what I knew about using math skills outside of school, I began feeling the math I was teaching in school was much too abstract and thus useless. After all, in the real world simple arithmetic with whole numbers was just about all most every student would ever need, and yet I was expected to teach all students ideas and skills they would almost certainly never need. How many times have you ever needed to add 2 negative numbers together? When would most anyone ever need to solve equations like ax2 + bx + c = 0, except maybe to pass another standardized math test? When would students ever want to know how the Babylonians used to count, and when 2 trains will meet if they’re traveling at different speeds, except of course if their car runs out of gas on the railroad crossing? And the more I questioned that model, the more I desired to know more about Dewey’s liberal model. What exactly did it mean? How much different was it from a book-centered model? And I also learned most parents already believed and trusted in such a conservative learning model; they believed what they were told to believe: learning more book-facts was the best way for their children to make more money than they were making. Slowly, I began working to make my classroom a more enjoyable and less stressful place to be; I began making the work as easy and fun as possible. I realized the desire to keep learning would grow if they felt confident they could learn anything. Luckily, this was before the recent conservative push to break public education’s political power with more standardized testing and charter schools. Today, I probably wouldn’t last more than a year at most public schools, even though math teachers are always needed.
No doubt, student desires to learn more were increased as I openly praised their good work, and showed a real interest in it. Instead of just sitting at my desk I would walk around and see how they were working. Like all young folks students appreciate adult attention. Their desire to please a teacher was one thing in my favor, so I took advantage of it. Even though far too much of what I gave them was for the most part routine busy work, I tried making the assignments as enjoyable as I could; after all, it’s difficult to desire anything that isn’t pleasant and enjoyable. I even bought some electronic math games to play and some enjoyed using them too. I’m sure many students enjoyed the less stressful atmosphere too.
I began seeing something else as well, namely the power of actions to create desires. Sad to say, already by Junior High almost all students were conditioned to want more trivial book-assignments, no matter how useless they were in the real world. All the assignments I gave them weren’t questioned at all; they never asked where would they ever need to use such abstract knowledge, and if there wasn’t, then why should we desire to keep learning such knowledge? Their desires for more practical and useful kinds of knowledge, like school or community improvement projects, in effect had been all but killed while working on more book assignments! To me eventually that result felt rather scary. How can we increase student desire to build such important character habits when students aren’t allowed to actively explore and feel what such knowledge is like, or any excellent kinds of knowledge? In short, the desire to learn such useful knowledge was almost non-existent; they didn’t know how to start learning the knowledge and skills useful outside of school, like how to work and talk intelligently and joyfully.
Busy-work assignments were just about all they had ever known, and if so, then was there any difference between medieval schools and modern public schools? In medieval times children were taught mainly useless religious ideas, like sin and forgiveness, and our public schools students were being taught mainly useful book facts? In both cases, the knowledge was merely academic and idea-based, rather than useful for making life a better place to live. Such medieval educational ideas lived on for centuries simply because there were behavioral rituals tied to them; such ideas thus felt right. Thus, more and more, I came to feel I was part of the educational problem of building a more democratic nation, rather than a part of the solution for building student character and democratic health. At first, I never challenged students to think outside the classroom, to question what they were learning, ask them what kinds of math they would need in the real world, what kinds of math they wanted to learn about, who wanted to write their own math books, based on their own real life experiences, and perhaps learn more useful math skills. It took a while. After all, how could I practice such a liberal education art when I hadn’t been allowed to experimentally guide my own math studies? Perhaps sharing such thoughts may help today’s teachers make their own classes not only more actively enjoyable, but more useful to students after they graduate.
Since many medieval ideas and habits began fading about 4 centuries ago, and democracy began growing, such questions have become much more important to ask all students, whether the political system is communist, capitalist, or religious oriented. If not, then all such feudalistic systems will remain in place, supporting a few in luxury while most people merely scrape by. So, for all those liberal democrats interested in growing a healthier democracy, it might be useful to ask: what's most important is not only desiring to ask how intelligent and constructively creative questions, but also to keep working to make our public schools more democratic places for the next generation. Please remember, such intelligent desires and actions can start growing in our public primary schools if we demand they be taught. In today’s still feudalistic world, we liberal democrats don’t need more passive, obedient, and unquestioning students who keep allowing the wealthy to grow even wealthier, war after war to keep making that happen, while the poor become poorer.
Servant Habits verses Shared Habits
By stifling active kinds of learning projects, student desires for useful and creative habits are also being stifled. And, without such habits and desires, it remains easy for greedy and arrogant corporate CEOs to keep making obscene amounts of money, tell workers they won't be getting raises this year, and that more of the company's jobs are being shipped overseas! Without workers desiring to join together and increase their collective power for challenging such actions and protecting their own jobs, it’s easier and easier for such CEOs to keep making millions of dollars a year, and thus increase their own conservative political power to finance more and more politicians to pass more friendly laws! Today, many are called Big Business Democrats, Bill Clinton being one recent example. The Wal-Mart CEO reportedly makes around $18 million dollars a year while workers often need food stamps and public medical services to live! We liberal Deweyans say the more students passively accept working mainly with their books, the more they’ll desire such passively obedient and accepting actions, thus making life more dangerous and feudalistic for them. It wouldn’t be so absurd, but public tax money is actually financing such schools! Thus, a kind of vicious feudalistic social cycle continues on, where parents continue supporting such schools, where their children continue learning such conservative habits, and eventually support such schools themselves! There are some hopeful signs of democratic health, however, and so the next few elections in 2014 and 2016 will tell us more about the strength of those democratic habits in the world’s oldest feudal democracy.
Desiring Democracy’s Challenges
As we’ll see a little later, Dewey said desiring challenges and problems is the most intelligent thing to desire! Only when something is desired is there a chance for intelligent thinking and acting! How is something to be learned, and what’s a good plan of action? Without desire people simply continue living as they have. In that respect, we Deweyan liberals thus reject all calls to label desire as the root of all evil and suffering. On the contrary; desire creates the possibility for any kind of intelligent thinking and acting! Without the desire to build new schools, Buddhism’s founder Siddhartha Gotoma would never have discovered how to do so intelligently.
Desiring, say, to keep building a more democratic republic starts focusing the energy needed to experiment intelligently, and so teaching intelligent kinds of desire remains a great challenge for us today. Because the social and personal results of our conservative schools tend to make life more and more stressful, more and more caring people have begun desiring to improve such schools, as well as all the other feudalistic institutions still at work even today, including economic, political, military, and educational ones. During the Middle Ages, for example, the church created a feudal world by concentrating economic, religious, educational, and political power in the hands of a few people, and with their help have caused such systems are remain very much alive even today in most of the world. For us Deweyan liberals, conservative schools are in fact a very important reason why such authority-based feudal institutions still exist in Russia, China, the Western World, and the Muslim world too. The more children are made to obey their teachers and respect authority, the more they desire to act obedient and accepting, and thus perpetuate feudalistic habits and desires like the myth of absolute Truth. Such people want to keep students disconnected from learning more about what’s going on right around them, and what they can do to start improving it.
In a recent Washington Post article (2-13-13), Valerie Strauss reports how 2 researchers found some good reasons for liberals everywhere to reject and desire a change in the Common Core State Standards book-based model of education, especially for 1-3 grades. The title of the article is "Do young kids need to learn a lot of facts?" For one thing, such education goals were in fact written by people "without experience in child development or early education (like E. D. Hirsch Jr., an English professor)"...! Educators Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige also criticized the basic Common Core idea. They said: "Many Common Core advocates favor the corporate education agenda: privatizing public schools through charters, (government) vouchers, and online learning, and judging teachers and schools by standardized test scores." Teachers themselves know, "especially in the early years, children learn through active engagement with each other and the world around them. And they learn at widely different rates." They thus conclude grades 1-3 Core Standards are seriously flawed and "must be rewritten by early childhood educators ... to support learning and growth, not undermine them." No doubt, one article does not a liberal reform movement make, but without such articles it would be even more difficult to grow such movements, and signs show us they are growing.
I'll cite one example. The same newspaper edition also reported some of the educational thoughts of one student in a suburban Chicago high school, Arooj Ahmad. On his blog he writes:
The present education system in America is doing exactly what it is intended to do -- generate compliant workers for the economy. ... it's outdated.
...The practical solution ... lies in 2 key improvements ... : relevant, holistic (subjects) and freedom of subject choice.
... Project-based learning and collaboration should be emphasized. Inter-age cooperation, active learning, and mentorship must be encouraged.
Again, those are the very progressive thoughts of a high school student! No doubt, he’s just the tip of our progressive iceberg, so to speak. There’s no telling how many more students feel the same way. And of course what we Deweyans would add to those fine ideas is this: character development courses! They would help so many students around the country learn very important democratic habits of respect for worthy and law-abiding citizens, and health for both themselves and others. That way, students will leave school with some desire to practice democratic excellence in today's complex and rapidly changing world. They would have some useful knowledge in their muscles and not just in their mental memories. To liberal Dewey, people should desire their schools be used to keep strengthening democratic habits themselves, rather than ignoring the feudalistic status quo! In fact, conservatives have known for centuries such habits would weaken and diminish their own power, and so have continued working to stifle their growth more and more since World War 2. To build such desires for a more democratic world, we liberals say students should be free to choose more active-oriented community kinds of learning, including organizing protests and boycotts. They too are important signs of democratic health and excellence.
Such ideas weren't certainly something I felt deeply about as I began my teaching career; I grew up desiring to know more about sports than such liberal ideas. But they've become much stronger and more meaningful in recent years as I saw more of what has gone on, and what’s going on in the world. As we'll see in Section 34, Charter Schools, not only do some conservatives want to keep students obedient to book-facts, they also want to break teacher unions power apart, as well as start making profits from taxpayers who would pay for non-union for-profit charter schools! Many would charge taxpayers as much as they can even while keeping students practically chained to learning more and more book-facts. In short, charter schools in general have become yet another conservative form of public education still focused on teaching academic trivia.
We liberals want a better-working democracy, and the more democratic our public schools become, the easier it is to build such a democracy. As we’ll see in sections 35-39, in such schools young folks will begin learning more economic ideas, like economic bubbles, and how, when they break, life can become a living hell, as it has recently for millions of people a housing bubble burst. Many people were quick to invest their life savings in homes when banks began selling mortgages to just about anyone, whether they could keep paying them or not! And when the bubble burst they saw both their savings and homes evaporate when home prices started falling, jobs were lost, and banks kept demanding mortgage payments! And all the while bank CEOs continued giving themselves huge multimillion dollar bonuses, while mortgage sellers made hundreds of thousands of dollars!
Is it so wrong we democratic liberals believe our children can be much better educated even about economic ideas like bubbles, so they too can act more intelligently with their money after they graduate? In fact, a strong and intelligent democracy depends on intelligent individual habits, and the more useful knowledge students have, the more difficult it becomes for greedy people to keep scamming their money. Is it so wrong we liberals want to teach students more useful and healthful political and economic facts, like how to organize their diluted individual power into much more forceful collective power? We've already a long history of feudalism, and the results it produced kept stifling peoples’ desire and skill for building a better world for everyone; we simply want people to have the freedom to build more democratic schools in their own neighborhoods. After all, with such meek habits of obedience taught to primitive peoples in the New World, it was easy for a few Europeans to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of their gold and silver. The Sistine Chapel itself was financed with such stolen treasure. So, the more children are encouraged to intelligently practice more democratic habits of justice, respect, and tolerance, the stronger those desires will become. Much more than any other political system, democracy too depends on people learning more about tolerant and respectful personal and social habits, as well as sharing with and helping others less well off.
In my own case, the more history I redd, the more I saw a cause-and-effect connection between a conservative model of education and feudalistic kinds of social systems. Many may disagree with that idea, and believe conservative ideas are always true and god given. However, history has hundreds of examples of how dangerous they can be for most everyone. In the ancient world, for example, liberal democratic Greek sophists helped teach curious people useful habits like how to defend themselves in court, and also intelligently question conservatives and moderates who claimed to know nature’s absolute Truth. The entire Greek society was a nest of competitive contests, including conservative and liberal philosophers. Such democrats had already built many city-states around Greece, rather than leaving them in control by a small aristocratic class. Pericles and his beloved and honored female companion, Aspasia, were 2 fine examples of such democratic values, at least in Athens, as were a host of other people who built Western civilization’s secular liberal democratic foundations, like Protagoras, Democritus, and Epicurus.
Centuries later, liberal Italian Renaissance teachers too began desiring more liberal kinds of actions like respecting different individual desires and needs. People like Leonardo, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo are just a few results of such desires. They may not have helped create strong democratic systems, but they showed people what could be accomplished on a city model with a little knowledge and experimentation. Such people can continue teaching us even today how important such habits and desires still are. Today, almost no one realizes, just because our modern era began a few centuries ago doesn't mean it has become totally free from its base of feudalistic habits, not by a long shot! As we’ve been seeing, in many ways our world today is still largely feudalistic, especially in education. Thus democracy’s challenge today remains in many ways just as alive as it was in 1600! It also shows how important teachers are in the learning equation; they can either encourage or discourage student desires for better schools.
No doubt, many conservatives would object loudly. They might say, look at all the filth and immoral results our democracy has produced recently, with pornography available most everywhere, abortion, women soldiers, and even same-sex marriages. What's next, an atheist president, transsexual senators, and married priests? If those are the results of desiring liberal ideas and actions, then they’re destructive of all that’s good and decent in life, and so we'll continue fighting against such habits. They are all subverting the eternal values of goodness upon which Western civilization has existed for centuries. The Middle Ages may not have produced artists and philosophers like our modern era, but back then people knew who they were, and how to gain eternal life after living decent lives in our painful and dangerous world. So why teach children not to desire what’s been traditionally worthwhile and valuable in life? After all, what does it profit a person to gain the world, and yet lose their soul to sin and filth? There is a higher kind of moral law at work in the universe and that is the law we all should desire to know and practice, especially children! What’s more, if everyone merely followed their own desires and did what they wanted, then how could anything ever get done? Such liberal desires are thus dangerous to civilization and eternal Truth itself. Obedience to Natural Law is the most important habit to teach. Otherwise we create a society of social anarchy, disease, and more suffering.
With such thoughts we can see what the historian of philosophy William Jones called a fundamental parting of philosophic ways! No amount of arguing or debate can resolve the fundamentally different assumptions between conservatives and liberals, and yet such debate should happen in all healthy democracies. Why? How else can young folks starting learning about how important assumptions are in any system of thought? And how else can they learn how to intelligently judge those assumptions by the actual evidence for them, and the results they help produce, unless they begin hearing such debates even in junior high school? Just because liberals and conservatives have different assumption about life and nature doesn’t mean there’s no objective way to judge which assumptions are better or worse! What are the actual results those assumptions are producing in the real world, and where is the evidence for them? The actual results of assuming racial superiority, like lynchings and beatings of law-abiding citizens, became the most important way for judging and condemning their worth and value.
Such debating, even in our public junior highs, also can focus on another important learning challenge: how can we make our desire to peacefully live together become a reality without killing each other? What kind of conflict resolution skills can we learn to promote a more peaceful society? How can we create a truly intelligent democracy without first acting intelligently in our schools and homes? Thus we say liberal and conservative assumptions need to be debated in our public middle and high schools, helping all students learn more about the real world, and also the character habits most useful in that world. Such liberal schools encourage young folks to first see different people have different habits, and then also to see respectful and peaceful actions are the best way to build a more intelligent and satisfying nation.
For example, here’s an important question for debate: How does it hurt anyone to respect same-sex marriages, non-religious politicians, or people who desire to watch whatever they want? And if it doesn't hurt anyone else, then why restrict or attack them? That’s one of the great questions going around the world today. And the more people see the democratic results of such freedom, the faster a feudalistic control of people is ending. It thus remains a challenge for liberal democratic public schools to keep allowing students to practice such ideas, and thus to desire them. For Dewey in the early 1900s, the time had come to simply apply such democratic ideals of freedom and liberty to our own public schools, so more students could learn to more intelligently express their desires and needs, as well as learn how to judge their democratic worth more intelligently.
Professional sports have been another way of celebrating different individual talents. Management’s job is to blend different talents so the team works well together for a common goal. Isn’t that the same way it works in the corporate world too? After all, at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California many different talents join together as a team to put people on the moon, send robots to Mars, and perhaps even find out where to get a good pair of running shoes for less than a home mortgage! However, the question still arises: Should we desire to keep financing such missions, or would those billions of dollars be better spent here on earth? Why simply keep assuming it’s right to spend billions of dollars trying to send a few people to the moon or Mars? Why not just send robots to those places? Could we better use the savings to build better schools and hospitals here on earth, as well as better homes, work spaces, and recreation areas benefiting more than just a few people? Or should we continue allowing homeless people to sleep on the streets while a few people jump around on the moon or Mars?
So, it seems to me what’s most important for building the desire to learn more liberal values is first allowing students more freedom to practice more constructive and helpful actions in school. How else can we build such valuable desires into the next generation? After all, what’s more important: encouraging students to desire learning more excellent character habits, or passing the next standardized test? In fact, not respecting African desires and talents helped make slavery the often vicious and brutal institution it was. It helped create a Nazis-like state in many places, terrorizing and even killing law abiding people who simply wanted equal rights. Such violent and brutal results helped condemn all such actions and the racist assumptions they rested on. Brains with good memories certainly aren’t everything; intelligent character habits are useful to everyone too, and unless democratic habits are taught, then the desire for building a democracy is that much weaker. What’s the sense in studying for years to become an ace mathematician, astrophysicist, or shoe maker if a person doesn’t know how to have fun without illegal drugs, treat people honestly and respectfully, and also respect our just laws? If parents have the right to teach children such habits, then why shouldn’t our schools too?
31. THE EIGHT YEAR STUDY AND BEYOND
Obviously, conservatives have their own models of educational excellence based on their own assumptions about life and nature, and so will continue challenging and competing against our more liberal Deweyan curriculum and experimental learning methods. Conservatives say a book-based model is best, while liberals say a student-centered model is best. It may be interesting to note, the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong called the conservative model 'stuffing the duck,'! It makes most every students learn more and more academic facts rather than how to use their facts creatively and constructively. Still, for conservatives today such an education defines an educated person, and students should get healthful exercise on athletic fields after school, rather than allowing them to practice such skills whenever they want, work on constructive community beautification and repair projects, and also build personal habits of character excellence. For conservatives, academic knowledge defines an educated person. So, 2 questions become important: Are we hopelessly locked into an endless education debate with no clear choice; and if not, then where is the objective evidence a liberal Deweyan model is at least as good for preparing students for higher academic university studies? This section, then, will help answer those 2 very important questions; without real evidence for its usefulness, how can we end debate and begin experimentation on a neighborhood level, and also feel confident those kinds of educational experiments can produce the results they predict?
Luckily such questions were answered decades ago with a research project called the Eight Year Study, but before looking more closely at it and its findings, a few more useful results of liberal schools will be mentioned. For example, we can say liberal schools really build the active learning habits at the base of the American tradition of independent self-reliance! All through American history such habits were used to build our society and nation. No doubt, brutal, vicious, and greedy habits were also practiced, especially against Native Americans and other countries, but for the most part such habits were useful to spread civilization itself. The point is, however, such independent habits are needed to keep building our democracy so all peaceful people can have equal rights and opportunities.
In fact, today there're still a large number of community spaces in need of beautification and also intelligent rehabilitation, like building, say, community gardens and fish farms; how many potholes will more independent acting students repair intelligently, and thus help make their communities safer places to drive? In many neighborhoods too violent gun use continues making life more dangerous than ever, and so wouldn’t more intelligent and respectful students help lessen those dangers? In other words, aren’t people actively solving their own community problems what American initiative and independence has been for the past 2 centuries? So, again, we Deweyans say only in such liberal schools can children learn such intelligently independent habits. The more those skills are ignored in our conservative book-centered schools, and the more such actions have become encased and frozen by law, the more people have needed to rely on the government to solve their on-going challenge to teach the next generation habits of intelligent independence. The more such habits are ignored, the more need there will be for government help with healthcare, job security, job creation, retirement, and recreation areas.
In short, we liberal Deweyans say conservative schools are in fact helping create the need for big government, rather than lessening it. And if so, then the liberal challenge is to keep building better schools, where such practical skills like intelligent independence are practiced on a daily basis. We aim to teach children to work intelligently and peacefully together on a local level, rather than waiting for the government to solve social problems like unequal rights, and thus create the need for more taxes? In conservative schools children learn to passively rely on others to say what they should do and learn, and if so, then so we say such obedient habits are really creating the need for more government, rather than lessening it? In short, it seems conservatives are more concerned about supporting our feudalistic military, corporate, and political systems than building habits of intelligent independence into the next generation. Such an educational system suffers internally from a logical disconnect, but it also shows where conservation values really lay – in the perpetuation of obedient feudalistic systems of concentrated power. In reality, however, their book-centered learning model is actually helping create the need for more government! It’s yet another reason we Deweyan liberals say that model needs to be replaced with one teaching more habits of intelligent self-reliance and equal rights and opportunities for all.
Some Conservative Objections
No doubt, conservatives have their criticisms of liberal education too. For example, many might say a liberal learning program will simply be too chaotic and disruptive to both students and teachers if it’s put into place all at once. At first many students with book-centered habits would feel lost, and others will feel they can do whatever they want, or even nothing at all, and thus be freer to act on their disruptive impulses. Thus, many teachers and students will become not only disoriented, but endangered as well. Young folks need to have limits set for their actions, or else they'll learn little, if anything. If they suddenly find themselves free to learn whatever they want, then too many students will quickly lose their will to learn anything, resulting in school chaos more than anything else.
In fact, both teachers and students are already conditioned to a conservative educational model, by even junior high as you noted earlier, and even more so in high school and college. Thus, again, radically changing a school's learning program all at once would result in education chaos. Student disorientation and discipline would become more rampant than it already is! After all, it was easy for people like Dewey to build his liberal Lab School at an ivy-towered campus, where he had a lot of very talented teachers to help him, and a lot of motivated young students willing to experiment with different kinds of learning activities. But where is the evidence such a liberal program and its experimental learning methods are both affordable and actually produce intelligent and independent student habits fitting them for a university education and beyond? Where is the evidence such schools won't become too expensive to run, especially during recessions when tax revenues are lower? And if so, then won’t such schools be forced to become conservative book-centered schools again? In the 1930s it happened in the liberal Gary, Indiana district and many others around the country. Conservative book-centered schools may not be all they should be, but they’re often all we can afford to make them!
Those certainly sound like important questions, if not legitimate criticisms, especially those about being able to prepare students for college work, which is mainly learning more academic trivia, and the question about building such school system all at once. Such questions are important for any public school system, whether liberal or conservative. They’re important, but they can be answered without resorting to a conservative learning model.
Results of a Liberal Learning Model
First things first. The question about preparing students for college in liberal primary and secondary schools was answered with 3 famous studies done from 1930 to 1942. They helped people see the objective results of a liberal learning model do in fact prepare students for a successful college career, and in some way prepare them even better than conservative schools. The specific question of these studies was this: what high school subjects are really the best ones to ensure college success? Was it the conservative book-centered model, where, say, mainly mathematics teaches students how to reason and history teaches them how to memorize facts? Or were students better prepared to maximize their learning opportunities in college with more active and experimental student-centered projects, where knowledge and skills of intelligent independence were learned as students actively worked on special projects? What’s called the Eight-Year Study was built to answer those questions? Not to spoil the drama, but once again the results produced more objective evidence for believing liberal kinds of student-centered schools were just as effective for helping students succeed in college, and in some ways even more useful than the habits taught in conservative high schools. In some respects liberal schools produced even more intelligent habits making it easier to succeed in college!
From 1910 to 1930 more liberal learning programs were built in many places around the country, and then in the ‘30s the results of those experiments were studied. What did the study look like? Well, the Progressive Education Association (PEA) selected about 30 high schools from around the country, in places like Des Moines, Iowa, Chicago, Illinois, Denver, Colorado, Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. In some of their schools progressive teachers built a more active liberal learning model for some students, while other students went through a more conservative learning program. Then they simply followed those 2 groups of students after they went on to college, to see how they then performed. The PEA also got around 250 colleges to alter their admissions policies for those students who had gone through the liberal curriculum, so they could be admitted. Four years of high school, plus 4 years of college made it an 8-year study. Isn’t basic math wonderful, and just about all anyone needs in the real world?
Not surprisingly, they found the liberal-educated students often did just as well grade-wise as more conservatively educated students, and often learned many other intelligent skills as well, like becoming better motivated to learn, and also better at teaching themselves what they wanted! In other words, they found a liberal project-oriented curriculum was at least as effective as conservative passive models for success in college, as well as enjoy learning keep broadening their own knowledge. In short, liberal educated students had more desire and curiosity to keep learning mainly because those important skills were taught to them. Learning thus became more enjoyable and rewarding. Many students in the liberal program simply had more intellectual curiosity than other students. In fact, many of them earned higher grade point averages (GPAs) in college, had more academic honors, better systematic thinking habits, and perhaps best of all, simply enjoyed learning more and thus were more curious about life itself than those in the conservative program. Such results were real evidence of how much more effective a liberal student-centered learning program was compared to a book-centered program.
The study showed learning more actively experimental and enjoyable skills increased their desire to keep learning more! And the more that happened, the more students wanted to learn! Was the study just a fluke?
Was it in some ways biased? Well, other studies since then have also shown what learning program was at least as effective for college studies. Thus, one important conclusion seems very reliable: There really is no one single educational program to best prepare students for college, as conservatives like to say and think. The Eight-Year Study proved such thinking is merely wishful thinking. So, learning useful skills for college is an organic affair; they don’t just require a verbal mind and memory, but the body as well. When students are taught such skills intelligently and holistically, active learning projects will be even more educational than mere book studies. Thus, liberal Deweyan ideas were confirmed by real evidence: college success depends on much more than knowing a lot of book facts; it depends on one’s communication skills, study habits, curiosity, talking more freely with teachers, asking intelligent questions, experimenting more on their own, and enjoying learning's adventure rather than feeling it’s a chore! Is there another reason why suicide is the largest killer of college-age people?
So, with such results another ‘eternal and unchanging conservative concrete educational Truth’ was shattered! If we want to train students to merely learn what teachers tell them to learn, then conservative schools are useful. If, however, we want more independent and creatively experimental students who are better prepared to live in a democracy and grant equal rights to all other law-abiding people, who are more at home in an ever-changing world, and who both want and know how to keep practicing intelligent habits on their own, then a more liberal project-oriented learning model is in many ways better. And of course, perhaps the best result was this: parents needn’t shop around and increase the personal debt paying for expensive private liberal schools for their children; more liberal learning programs can be built right into their own neighborhood schools, with the help of progressive and caring parents, teachers, state legislators, and helpful school administrators!
No doubt, expensive liberal private schools are available, like the Dalton School in New York, and Summerhill-type schools based on A. S. Neill's school founded in Suffolk, England in 1921. In Neill’s school students had complete educational freedom to study what they wanted, or even not study at all. As a result, most Summerhill students will probably not become rocket scientists or engineers, but they will build a fine democratic habit of respect and tolerance for all other peaceful and law-abiding students.
What’s Been Happening Since Then?
So, perhaps now readers may be wondering why haven’t more liberal schools kept growing here in the US, especially since their students can easily go on to college and succeed there? Why have conservative models been solidified and mummified by laws, like NCLB in the Bush 2 administration and now the Common Core Standards laws in many states? Why do conservative educators like Washington, D. C’s. Michelle Rhee and ex-Florida governor Jeb Bush continue saying a conservative education model is best for everyone, even for minority students who haven’t learned to love book-facts the same way white students have? Ms. Rhee continues saying the main problem with US education is the teachers and their unions; they often resist any kind of effort to make students keep learning more and more book-facts. As we'll see later, there's some truth to that idea, but such actions are based on sound educational reasons. As we’ve just seen, saying the main learning goal for all students should be more academic facts is simply not borne out by the Eight-Year Study’s results. No doubt, to see why such liberal learning programs have become the exception, rather than the educational rule, would require a book of its own, but we can again review a few of the conservative forces at work helping prevent such schools from growing. In essence, it seems conservatives are much more interested in preserving the feudalistic economic, political, and educational systems, and so have been using their power to keep such programs from growing. And, such forces continue working to this day, enslaving children to their learning model and building habits useful in corporate, military, and political systems – passive and obedient habits.
Are such conclusions really too radical and unfounded? Well, let’s see. One such critic of Ms. Rhee is Richard Kahlenberg at the Century Foundation. He recently challenged her idea that teacher unions were really the main obstacle to increased student test scores. He wrote: "... (in) the American South, where teachers' unions are weak ... the schools are (still) not lighting the world on fire. ... (And in) charter schools ... you can do everything that Michelle Rhee wants to do -- fire bad teachers and pay good teachers more. And yet, the most comprehensive studies looking at charter schools nationally find mediocre (test) results."
Also, to see conservative forces more clearly, we should look at US education history itself. It’s a very complex event, but for us liberals, one very important part of that history since the 1950s is the public’s general ignorance about liberal educational options themselves! Most people in 2013 still know hardly anything about Dewey’s liberal learning models of excellence. Since the late 1940s and ‘50s liberal models of education have become more diverse as well, helping weaken the movement itself. Many school districts experimented with other radical models all at once, rather than a one-year-at-a-time method of growth. And, without strong leadership to guide any movement, excessive diversity becomes counterproductive, and Dewey himself died in 1952. Similar diversity helping weaken a movement seems to have happened with jazz music. It seemed to have begun declining with harsh-sounding avant-garde musical experiments in the '50s. Fusion jazz seemed to recapture some popular support in the early ‘70s, thanks to people like Miles Davis, but who listens to jazz today? It's almost a completely dead art form except for a few festivals and concerts here and there.
As I mentioned earlier, there were a number of destructive conservative social forces, like World War 2, Korean War (sorry, Police Action), the Cold War, the Space Race, Vietnam, and the general economic situation since the 1980s, when women were almost forced to work to make up for corporations leaving salaries at about the same level while prices continued rising. All such social events helped drain liberal education's reform knowledge and thus its energy; religious conservatives in the ‘50s kept people on a psychic edge over atheistic communists, often linking Dewey and many others to them. As a result, it’s become easier for conservatives to keep building and legalizing the kinds of book-centered schools they want to help maintain their feudalistic forms of power. All such forms depend on obedient and compliant habits; they’re good for business, for profits, for obscene CEO salaries, and good for the stocks they own.
Recently, however, the growing and socially stifling weak results of the conservative model, like increased jail populations and youth unemployment, as well as skyrocketing jail costs to the public, are helping cause politicians to look again at a more liberal education model, In California, for example, state Democrats are now more focused on building schools serving the educational needs of those 70% of students who don’t go on to college, and so need to learn some useful and intelligent employment skills before they graduate, so they’re less tempted to earn bad money sells drugs, committing other kinds of economic crime, increasing prison costs, and returning to prison soon after they’re released. In California some 70% of parolees soon return to prison; there simply aren’t that many laundry jobs on the outside.
Thus, more liberal Democrats are now working to break the conservative hold on our schools, so more people can learn more useful skills and become more productive members of society, rather than helping cause taxes to keep going up and up. They’re looking for more ways to get the business community involved in helping build such schools, as well as the government to weaken all our restrictive education laws. We liberal Deweyans ask why shouldn’t even primary-age students be free to learn about policing and fire-fighting habits in school! Shouldn't our tax-supported public schools be helping students better enjoy learning more practical character and employment skills while in school, and thus help reduce our criminal, drug, unemployment, high drop-out rates, and health problems? After all, such unhealthful habits are all learned, and so can be improved in more liberal schools where a conservative book-centered program is gradually replaced with a more progressively practical learning system. With the NCLB law, for example, conservatives have effectively chained all students to basically a feudalistic kind of learning model; students learn only what teachers say they should learn and often such knowledge is useless in the real world! Am I sounding too much like a broken record? Good! That means the reader is finally learning more about liberal kinds of school programs!
Weak and unhealthful results of conservative schools are growing, and they’re helping thoughtful people look for viable alternatives. Still, few parents today know about Dewey’s liberal ideas; shutting off such ideas began in the 1950s, soon after China became another openly communist nation, and then Sputnik was launched in 1957 by Russia, the largest communist nation on earth! It meant they could put hydrogen bombs on their rockets and all but destroy the entire country! The fear of atomic warfare was so great, many Americans began building backyard fallout shelters, and asking how our government could let such things happen. Suddenly liberal Democrats and public schools were partly blamed for such events. Conservatives were quick to say our public schools were a main reason Russia beat us into space, when in reality it was the German scientists Russia captured after the war! As a result, more people asked why aren’t our schools producing more rocket scientists and engineers? Thus the Cold War soon helped create more conservative schools focusing on teaching more math and science book-facts.
Then, in the 1960s conservative California Governor Ronald Reagan certainly didn't help the liberal cause much; in fact he warred against it. During the Vietnam War college students began occupying university offices and protesting against that brutal and vicious war and its draft. Reagan moved quickly to not only deny students their constitutional rights of free speech and protest, but also to reduce state funding for the university system. Not only did he begin dismantling the excellent California system, where most everyone could afford college and learn more democratic habits, but also as president he also attacked the entire liberal model of government itself as a useful counterbalance to huge corporate power. He said government was not the solution, it was the problem, and the idea has been echoing in conservative rhetoric ever since! Almost no one pointed out our conservative schools were helping create the need for big government. No doubt, big-business conservatives from coast to coast celebrated when he said it, and he would probably also have loved to see all public schools dismantled and privatized for profits, profits, and more profits. In general, it seems conservatives love to see the public keep learning regimented habits.
Then, 19 radical Arabs attacked on September 11, 2001; that too was a major setback for liberal education, as has the World Bank as well, as we saw earlier with Lois Weiner’s work. Instead of looking at our own actions in, say, Saudi Arabia, where most of the high-jackers came from, and asking ourselves what caused them to commit such an act, conservative George Bush 2 told the nation Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was building atomic weapons and Afghanistan was harboring radical Islamists. As a result of his tax cuts, a compliant and obedient American public were soon saddled with a $5 Trillion increase in debt to finance wars in both those places, a debt conservative Republicans now say is the reason we must decrease aid to poor and also reduce taxes on the rich! Even after no such weapons were found in Iraq the public was almost silent in protest. Something like a million innocent Iraqis lost their lives, and who knows how many Afghans and Americans lost their lives, were maimed for life, how many billions of taxpayer dollars were thrown away on regional Afghan warlords controlling the heroin trade, or how many millions corporate CEOs made in the process! War has always been good for some businesses.
What’s more, towards the end of the Bush 2 administration, a very destructive housing bubble grew and then burst, causing the worst recession in 2008-09 since the Great Depression, a recession we have yet to recover from! Even putting another $5 Trillion on the American tab hasn’t helped much. Other than those results, the conservative Bush 2 administration has been a great success, hasn’t it? And, as mentioned earlier, recently the World Bank too has begun withholding loan funds from countries who don’t build more conservative school systems! Is it because the World Bank itself is financed by huge American corporations? Thus, on a continuing basis, more public attention has continued being diverted and restricted from building better schools to lessen many of our feudalistic social weaknesses. Some politicians even call it a 2nd tier topic, when in reality we liberals say it should always be among the most important topics in any country! Without educating the next generation how to act more intelligently, we’re doomed to keep seeing the same weak social results.
No doubt, the great 2008 economic meltdown was a big eye-opener for many people; many believed what corporate advertisers wanted them to believe: our economic system is the biggest and best on earth, and, in one way it was; it continued producing huge profits for our conservative feudalistic banking corporations. As the housing market went bust in 2007-08, however, more people suddenly woke up psychically, so to speak, and began feeling they needed more government protection from corporate greed and power or they too would become homeless! Also, most of the bankruptcies in the US were caused by huge medical bills most people couldn’t afford to pay. So, with their brief few moments of power in 2009, Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, helping poor people get the medical insurance they needed. Education thus remained off the burner, so to speak, even though the Eight Year Study has shown conclusively conservative book-centered learning certainly should not have the educational monopoly it now has. By regularly running the results of international standardized tests in our newspapers, and showing how weak US student results are, people keep believing the only solution is to make students learn more academic facts, as well as reward teachers who make that happen and punish those who don’t, even though our economy is far larger than any other nation. Thus conservative reformers continue being listened to.
Slowly, then, beginning in the 1960s, our public schools have become overwhelming conservative and regimented; even some teacher unions played a part in the process. Many teachers wanted legislators to help make their jobs easier and more secure, and so many education laws were passed with their approval, creating what's called education Red Tape. Such laws made it much more difficult to fire even incompetent teachers, as well as experiment with more liberal ideas. Thus, having gone through only a conservative public school system, most people really believed it was the best system. To almost everyone today the name John Dewey means nothing except, perhaps, the guy who lost to Harry Truman in 1948, or the guy who built the Dewey decimal system for libraries! FYI, in 1948 that was Thomas Dewey, not John, and the Dewey Decimal System was invented decades before Dewey was even born in 1859!
Winds of Democratic Change?
This book aims to help educate more people around the world about Dewey’s liberal models of educational excellence. After all, the World Bank is just that, working around the world. Dewey’s ideas are still badly ignored not only in the US, but around the world as well. Only a few European countries know how useful his ideas are. On a positive note, however, the elections of 2008 and 2012 show us a liberal democratic spirit is far from dead and finished; in fact in many places it’s growing stronger, like in California and New York. Even so, people still need to know more about what liberal excellence can mean before they can demand such changes in their own neighborhood schools. Without such ideas all feudalistic social forms will continue slowing the growth of democratic habits.
In any case, the so-called educational bottom line remains in place: only if enough people come together and focus their attention on improvements AT THE LOCAL LEVEL, can any meaningful progress continue growing! Our young folks can start learning what character excellence really feels like, and how they can enjoy making intelligent contributions to our nation and their neighborhoods during their school years. For us Deweyan liberals such schools represent a vast untapped source of creative democratic energy. We also know, the best test of excellent education is not merely higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, and how many times a child has been student-of-the-month. In the 1930s, during the Eight Year Study, less than 25% of students even went to college, and a far smaller number actually graduated. Thus, what matters most to us Deweyan liberals is how many students learn to contribute positively to life during their primary and high school years, learn to respect just laws and people with different life-style habits, work for equal rights and opportunities, enjoy becoming the person they want to become, and also help others who’re working honestly to learn new skills and knowledge. Such excellent democratic character habits cannot become forceful and vibrant will power merely by reading more books; they must be actively practiced on a holistic body-mind level if they’re to keep growing at all.
Recent Reform Experiments
Lastly, I mention briefly a few recent reform experiments; creative impulses can almost certainly never be completely killed. For example, as the 20th century was closing, many educational weaknesses became more obvious, especially in urban schools where the love of book-knowledge is relatively weak. How many young Spanish-American kids have you seen out selling something to help their family, rather than be in school?
Even before conservative reformers began talking about charter schools in the early 1990s, or giving parents publicly-funded schools vouchers to use even in conservative religious schools, another experiment in reform happened in the Chicago Public Schools where I went to school, and where my older brother taught for years. There, weak personal and social results helped some parents begin looking for solutions. For example, student Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores had been going down in reading since 1972 while rising somewhat in mathematics. It’s understandable. Reading is often less useful in math class than merely watching the teacher solve a problem. When I was doing my student teaching one of my mentors said math was one of the easiest subjects to teach; just show students how to solve a problem and then give them some problems to work on; they really didn’t need to practice their reading or creative thinking skills; just imitate the teacher.
So, a group of Chicago parents went down to the state capitol in Springfield and convinced lawmakers to change some educational laws so they could experiment with some new ideas. But, as Diane Ravitch describes in her very readable book Left Back, the reforms didn't last long. Evidently parents didn’t have a very detailed plan of subjects they wanted to keep in place, like experimental community projects. Slowly, then, teachers put a conservative book-centered program back in place; such a program in fact makes teaching rather easy. And so the all-important reform energy to keep experimenting soon weakened.
In fact, in Left Back Dr. Ravitch describes a number of liberal 20th century education experiments. Another was called the life-adjustment experiment. It could be described as a much more anarchic learning model than Dewey's, and more like the Summerhill model. It generally ignored academic subjects completely, and let students learn whatever they wanted, as long as it was legal. It might have worked in the 1940s, when many students went right into the military after high school, and didn't have to look for a job, but after World War 2, as Cold War fears began spreading, such a loose learning system was no longer tolerated. With radical and disrespectful Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s help, many people were made to feel communists in the government were creating serious social weaknesses, and thus National Security was at stake.
Of course for Dewey, such loose learning ideas never were best; all his educational suggestions helped build a better psychological foundation for academic studies later in high school, rather than all the way through public school. His more active learning model aimed at helping students more deeply feel important ideas like character excellence and experimental intelligence with the help of constructive neighborhood projects. He wanted students to be able to feel what kinds of improvements could be built by them, and thus increase student creativity as well! Even ace inventor Thomas Edison wished he had more knowledge of chemistry, so creating new inventions would be easier. Thus, for Dewey, academic knowledge has a use, but it should be taught mainly in the 11th and 12th grades, rather than before. In the next section, then, we’ll see a few more examples of his ideas.
32. DEBATING EDUCATIONAL ASSUMPTIONS
Like so many other caring people we Dewey humanists too work at increasing intelligent actions and decreasing violent ones, especially in our schools. Next to parents our schools are the most important sources of training and knowledge to the next generation. Obviously, to we liberals many places around the world and in the US are still an educational challenge: conservative states and many urban schools, much of the Middle East, Southern Asia, much of Africa, and of course South America still have book-centered schools. Even China and Russia still have conservative schools in place. After all, what form of government besides a democratic one doesn’t want obedient and compliant people to accept their feudalistic systems? In short, there’s a lot of room for educational improvement, both in the US and around the world as conservative systems and their assumptions continue obstructing the growth of liberal democratic schools. In this section, then, we look at a few more educational assumptions; it may help clarify Dewey’s ideas even more.
Socially, what have been some obstacles to building such schools? Well, two World Wars, the brutal and vicious Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, many smaller outbreaks, and of course domestic crime and murder are more than enough evidence for such distracting and lessening of money for better schools. I grew up in Chicago during the 50s and early 60s, during relatively peaceful times, but still the schools were largely segregated and fraternal-gangs put on musicals rather than bought guns. Today, however, with increasingly desperate economic forces, more and more young folks often join a neighborhood gang to make some drug-money, and even kill others over who gets to sell drugs where.
So, naturally, the question becomes: how can we improve all those distracting social conditions to start building better schools and producing better social results? One liberal assumption says money is the main obstacle to building such schools. If we can simply give poor folks more money so they can better provide for their families, they’ll have more time to read to their children so they can do better in school. In this section, then, we’ll look at that assumption plus some others about social improvement in general, and then compare them to Dewey’s ideas. All liberals seem to agree, modern capitalist society and its schools can be improved, but upon what assumptions should an improvement model be based? Should we aim at merely giving poor folks more money or is building better schools the best way to solve many of our social problems of unemployment, crime, corporate greed, and political control by the upper class?
As we’ve seen, there’re a variety of liberal assumptions about how best to improve our schools in particular, and capitalistic society in general. Karl Marx, for example, assumed a worker run economy would naturally and automatically create a better world for everyone, as if actually teaching the next generation more intelligent habits could be completely ignored. He also assumed violent revolution in all but a few countries was the key to such improvement.
The very fine 1960s film A Fine Madness, also offers another assumption about social improvement. In it a psychologist, played by Colleen Dewhurst, tells Sean Connery: “If you want better people, then you must give them a better world.” That assumption is similar to Marx’s and the one stated above. Merely remove some economic barriers for some people, build a better world for them, and a better world will automatically begin growing. Again, it seems to minimize the need to actually teach youngsters the habits needed to keep such a world from crumbling, or be taken over by wealthy conservatives, like they’ve been doing for the past 40 years.
For the past few centuries in the West, the great importance of an encouraging, satisfying, and rewarding environment has been growing, and of course behaviorist Dewey too saw how important one’s surroundings are for growing any kind of habit. In fact, during that time the new science called sociology grew; few people, however, realize the study of society goes back even before Plato, in ancient Greece. His classic book called Republic is a fine example of how important one’s environment is for teaching even smart people excellent habits. His arranged society so future leaders were educated for many decades to keep learning what he thought were important habits. Needless to say, Dewey too celebrated the importance of one’s environment for learning anything.
At the same time, however, history also teaches us to be very careful with words like ‘give’. For Functional Behaviorist Dewey, if we want a better world then we should ENCOURAGE people to intelligently keep BUILDING one! Only in the building of something better do we ourselves become better, more intelligent, wiser, and more knowledgeable people! In short, we know best only what we actively and intelligently build! For example, only as we build a relaxing habit into our muscles do we actually know what relaxation means. And if that’s true, if we know best only what we build, then it seems it’s best to assume our government and schools should give young folks the freedom, encouragement, tools, and materials to actually start building a better world!
It’s perhaps the most important lesson of the entire 2 million year history of human tool making, and of active experimental learning in general. Personal improvement is best achieved by WORKING to build more intelligent habits; only with such knowledge can a more equal and just society be maintained and protected from conservative forces of greed and concentrated power. Anthropology has taught us: only by experimentally building stone tools over 2 million years ago were our ancestors’ power, freedom, and knowledge increased to satisfy more easily their food needs. Nature gave them the raw materials and brains, but they had to actually build such simply stone tools to gain such power.
Again, if that’s true, then the more young folks are encouraged to actually work intelligently with tools at improving their habits, surroundings, and institutions, the more real knowledge and wisdom they will learn. As Dewey said, knowledge lives mainly in one’s muscles, how can they learn such knowledge without more active-learning schools? The recent weaknesses of our old welfare system of improving peoples’ lives by merely giving them welfare money, and assuming that would somehow result in building more intelligent people, is yet more real evidence for this idea: people learn excellent habits only as they WORK for them, not merely after accepting something they’re given.
The dismal results of that old welfare system point unmistakably to the same conclusion. In it merely giving people money only encourages wanting to be given more money. For example, merely giving women with children money simply encouraged women to have more children, rather than learn the skills and knowledge for supporting their family. In that respect, then, it seems conservatives had a good argument against such a welfare system; Dewey agreed too. Enjoying learning how to actually build more useful habits and skills, so a person can earn more money, best builds a person’s all-important will-power -- the actual knowledge and confidence to keep learning what they want to learn. In that process, say, government low-cost housing becomes another encouraging tool. In other words, learning to use tools constructively produces the best kind of knowledge. The more a person learns about intelligent planning and experimentation, the more intelligent the person becomes.
So, we Deweyan liberals ask again, why shouldn’t the next generation begin learning such valuable skills and knowledge in our public schools? Merely restricting student learning tools to books, paper, and pencils to answer book questions not only trains students to believe such knowledge is best, but there are other harmful results from such conservative learning. More importantly, it also prevents them from learning the useful knowledge and skills not only needed to build a better world, but also how to intelligently keep it going and growing! As we’ve seen, since the 1950s, without such skills and knowledge it became easy for conservatives to keep taking more social control of our economic, political, and educational systems while people kept struggling to make ends meet.
What’s more, such schools also encouraged students to passively rely on others for directions. They help build habits of dependence for being told what to learn and also when to learn it. The problem is: such habits are not very useful in better controlling a world in which conservatives continue working to increase their economic and political power. Both feudalistic corporate and military systems love to have people with such habits, but they’re also counterproductive. In effect, they help increase the need for more government services, like healthcare, retirement, and even food needs. So, a kind of class warfare and contest remains at work in human society, where conservatives and moderates generally work to gain more power and control over others, while liberals work to empower all people to build intelligent habits for equal rights and opportunities.
As we’re seeing in so many places even today, conservatives and their cousin-libertarians say governments should play a role in helping build schools where such habits are learned. And more recently, such schools should be built by the private sector, without teacher unions, and also run on a profit-basis; today many such Charter Schools exist. Conservatives would like nothing better than to break up liberal teacher unions, so they can take more of the public’s money while teaching students passive habits useful in the corporate world.
A Little More Social History
But the more such conservative public schools were built, beginning in the 1800s, the more the well-off were educated at private schools and expensive universities, while the poor were sent to work after a few years of school. Thus, the old medieval class-based world of rich and poor continued growing. Even decades after the Civil War such schools remained segregated racially, simply because more democratic habits weren’t taught to students. Such habits all but created the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements in the 1900s. But, by accepting a conservative system of educational success, defined as mere book-knowledge, and not building more intelligent and useful work skills, then society remained divided racially, economically, and politically. Only as women and Africans gained access to more useful educational tools, like universities, the military, and the corporate world, only then did American liberal ideals continue becoming something more than mere words.
With Dewey’s help in the early 1900s, the narrow and restricted conservative definition of educational excellence was broadened and democratized. No doubt, it helped workers during the 1930s keep sticking their employers by the thousands, and demanding a bigger share of the corporate economic pie. Thus, learning how to actively work intelligently and also build excellent democratic habits with active practice was built into US workers. What else was new? Such habits went back to ancient Greece itself.
At least since Zoroaster in the 600s BCE, and Socrates in the 400s BCE, the basic different assumptions about learning were in place. Even Zoroastrian priests were to learn nature’s truth by actively getting out into society and helping others. For Socrates, however, active learning was reducing to learning reasoning skills of debate. For him, as for Plato, manual work could never teach people the highest kinds of knowledge. In fact, Socrates probably believed such knowledge was a god given gift.
Then, in the 1700s, the corruption of social institutions began growing more important. Early liberal thinkers like Jean Rousseau began saying our social institutions, like the aristocracy and the church, were really social obstacles for actually building a better world for all people. Rousseau saw US primitives as examples of how natural goodness can grow without modern institutions. So, to him this assumption seemed obvious: Simply removing such perverting and stifling institutions from society will allow peoples’ natural goodness to grow and develop; just look at the American Noble Savages. At the time such ideas helped justify the French Revolution, and later on building schools like Summerhill, where students weren’t forced to learn anything. But, as we came to know more about the primitive war-dominated world and its habits, that assumption about the natural goodness of human nature proved to be just that, merely an idea, the same idea Colleen Dewhurst mentioned earlier. Still, the assumption became part of the 1800s Romantic Movement.
Then after Rousseau, economist Adam Smith and later revolutionary Karl Marx assumed economic institutions were the problem. For Smith the solution was to reduce all government regulations and allow markets to keep increasing wealth, while for Marx the solution was to eliminate private property and socialize the economy. In short, they too assumed merely changing or eliminating certain institutions would, somehow, automatically help people live more productive, satisfying, and intelligent lives! Eliminating certain institutions would somehow have the same kind of magical power King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was said to have. Marx thought if private property were abolished, then economic classes would cease to exist, allowing workers to intelligently run the businesses where they worked. Government, he said, would then simply fade away, an idea also echoed by anarchists too. Dewey, however, was much more anchored in reality; for him all the best kinds of improvement happen slowly, with intelligent baby-step improvements. Children were neither good nor bad; they were, instead, teachable, and so he naturally elevated public education to one of the most important institutions any nation can build. Again, nothing new there; conservatives have known that fact for thousands of years. In schools they knew children can learn either democratic or feudalistic habits, depending on what people feel is best.
Sociology Enters the Debate
Sociology, or the study of society, goes back at least to Plato. He was a keen observer of social forces and events, as were all intelligent Greeks. However, its modern form has only been growing for less than 200 years now, but it too has been divided by conservative and liberal assumptions. Dewey himself subtitled his Human Nature and Conduct as An Introduction to Social Psychology. More recently, however, William McCord has written an interesting book about some of these assumptions; it’s called Voyages to Utopia. In it he challenged some fundamental assumptions about human nature and society, as did Dewey before him. The book is a very fine study of a number of so-called political and economic utopias around the world, and their fundamental assumptions about human nature.
For example, he mentions a common assumption of many different economic writers: many of them simply assumed, like Rousseau, Marx, and the Colleen Dewhurst character, if economic, political, or educational institutions are changed, it would automatically allow a more ideal world to blossom, grow, and stay in place. Rousseau assumed if children were allowed to do whatever they wanted, they wouldn’t be corrupted by society, would become good people, would realize we’re all just people, and thus democracy would blossom. It’s as if liberal habit-arts were simply innate, inborn Cartesian-like faculties, merely needing freedom to grow. It's the fundamental assumption of many conservatives and libertarians today. The idea can even be found in Plato, who said if the political and educational institutions are right, then inborn faculties will naturally grow and blossom for everyone, from slaves to political leaders. Don’t bother freeing slaves, they’re slaves by nature and will thus remain so.
It was also a common assumption of both Adam Smith’s laissez-faire capitalism and Marxist Communism. Smith merely assumed market forces would always right themselves by some kind of invisible balancing force, thus avoiding recessions and what were called panics. They were often seen as the result government actions. And Marx too assumed if private property were abolished, a new age of communism would automatically start growing. There was just one tiny problem with those assumptions: they didn’t work at all in practice! The Great Depression finally put an end to any assumption about Smith’s self-correcting economic markets, and Stalinism soon became yet another repressive authoritarian dictatorship. Russia's economic collapse 1989 also ended talk about assuming private property is the main cause of human inequality, poverty, and injustice. Mr. McCord also finds such assumptions about institutions apply to a number of other utopian experiments:
“…many of the utopians were also convinced that alterations in social institutions (other than education) could change human nature. Lewis Mumford too pointed to this tendency when he observed: ‘They looked upon human institutions as these were so many straitjackets that cunning rulers had thrown over the community to make sane and kindly men behave as madmen.’ ” (322) (additions my own)
After Rousseau a similar assumption kept echoing through Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, anarchistic people like Max Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin’s version of communism, Mao Se Dung’s version of communism, 60s Hippies ideas, and even many militia groups. Change anything but our schools and intelligent human habits will automatically begin growing. In fact, changing any institution besides our public schools, and believing giving people more freedom has in fact NOT automatically improved either people or our world. For example, racial apartheid was removed from South African social and political life decades ago, and yet millions there continue suffering from severe poverty and ill health. Thus, we are led once again to Dewey’s basic educational assumption: to produce and educate more intelligent people, and to keep such democratic systems alive and growing, such habits must be practiced and used in the real world! In short, freedom, in and of itself, is not sufficient to build a better world. Only actively intelligent experimental work to build and maintain a better world can actually accomplish that goal!
Needless to say, we Deweyans too believe the assumption of innate human goodness or some abstraction called freedom is pure romantic fantasy, and the same may be said about the religious assumption of innate human sinfulness! Such assumptions have been mainly used to sell political and religious feudalistic models of life, and to convince people they should believe them and obey their leaders. Such assumptions helped convince people to merely keep practicing religious habits and they would finally achieve an eternity of heavenly bliss after a life of pain, poverty, and disease. As a result, for centuries people kept living miserable lives. If nothing else it shows again how propulsive some habits can become; the Church’s habits taught people to keep and maintain their feudalistic systems. Thus, conservatives really know how dangerous and powerful liberal schools can be to them; encasing conservative assumptions into federal and state laws, like No Child Left Behind, is yet more proof of how important such schools are to them and their social power.
Liberal utopian assumptions either about human nature or evil institutions shows a naiveté about human society and psychology conservatives don’t have. As long as children are educated to passive obey those in authority, it doesn’t matter what institutional reforms might happen. They can all be changed little by little, to keep benefiting and their quest for more power. It’s also why the World Bank has recently been linking needed loan money to building such schools. With Dewey’s help in the early 1900s, however, liberals around the world are waking up to education’s importance. Only in more liberal democratic schools will students learn more intelligent and democratic habits, and thus be much better prepared to not only build a more robust democracy based on equal rights, but also keep such a society in place, and immune from the socially destructive conservative quest for more and more social power.
Also, such active learning schools will better prepare students for a life of work in the real world. In fact, there’s a long history of evidence for people having deep and resentful feelings towards work itself, whether intelligent or routine. The Old Testament has merely another myth about Eve’s rebellion creating the need for work and toil itself. And Pandora’s Box is another one. In reality, however, our world can be best improved only as people WORK INTELLIGENTLY to improve it! So, wouldn’t we be doing a great service not only to the next generation, but to all future generations, if we build liberal schools where democratic feelings are easily felt and any kind of work becomes more intelligent and more rewarding before going out into the world?
In short, if we Deweyan liberals are right, then what’s most important educationally is not just freedom, but the freedom to practice intelligent work habits! It becomes fundamentally important not only for personal, but also social health as well. Mr. McCord also mentions a few interesting educational facts of successful cultures:
“They (successful cultures) have built educational systems that provide intellectual scope and vocational skills, and nurture inquisitiveness, critical faculties, and creativity. (On the average, expenditures for education in successful regions have averaged over 20% of gross national income each year.)” (336-337)
Unless I misread my government stats, in 2012 only about 3% of US federal spending went for education, while about 25% went for defense spending. Such conservative habits also help explain why people are accepting charter schools as a real improvement in education, even for-profit charter schools that tap even deeper into public monies as they continue doing for more missiles and tanks! Such actions will continue maintaining our feudalistic institutions until more people learn more about Dewey’s educational ideas, so we can start giving young folks the tools and freedom to learn what building a more democratic society feels like. If not, then powerful corporations and greedy wealthy people will continue working mainly for their own good. As far as maintaining huge differences in incomes and social classes, what is the difference between our modern corporations and medieval feudal fiefdoms?
The Difference Between Having and Using Tools
In our schools that difference makes all the difference in the world. Obviously, as much as possible, labor unions want to keep their members working building new schools and stocking them with the latest educational tools, like computer banks and so-called electronic tablets for all students. No doubt, since the 1970s such electronic tools have exploded both in and out of school; they can help simplify, organize, and increase learning as well as enjoyment. But if children are still chained to an old conservative book-centered learning model with such tools, then it's yet another version of conservative education. How can any electronic tool teach children excellent character habits? Only active and practical role-playing can best do that. All such tools and books can do is merely list which habits are important, but only active practice can teach students what such ideas actually feel like, and thus build their knowledge into their muscles, and not just into their thoughts.
Thus, no matter how dazzling and shiny new schools building and classrooms may be, they are still definitely not enough for learning liberal ideas of educational excellence. They merely create a learning field, not real knowledge and habits. As we’ve seen, from the beginning of life over 3 billion years ago, all excellent habits depend on active practice producing useful RESULTS; and such results depend on how ideas and feelings are USED! All habit-arts, especially intelligent ones, are continually tested in the real world. If they weren’t, then how could we begin feeling how conservative book-based schools are psychically weak and socially unhealthful for building democratic societies? Even Dewey’s ideas need to be tested to see their results. It’s merely one thing to build a corporation, but it’s something else to use it for the public good, rather than for giving a few leaders obscene amounts of money and salary.
For these and many other reasons already talked about, Dewey saw the best education assumption was this: intelligently active learning experiences are the only way to actually build and maintain a more democratic world. Only when, say, excessive gambling or drinking habits were seen as character weaknesses, rather than the devil's work or nature’s work, were educational organizations like Gamblers and Alcoholics Anonymous built to help people learn how to actively improve their weaknesses.
The assumption of active learning can be applied to prison reform as well. Only as prisoners have the freedom and tools to actively and intelligently teach themselves more useful habit-arts like respecting just laws and earning an honest living, does there become less chance of their committing a crime later on. Because such freedom and tools are still almost non-existent in our prison systems, and more of them are becoming more private, for-profit organizations, we will continue seeing people returning to prison soon after they’re released, and thus keeping more tax money flowing into for-private prison corporations! After all, why struggle on the outside when free room, board, and medical care makes many feel prison is the best place to be; why not stay where such services are given? Thus taxes are kept higher than necessary. So, again, we Deweyans ask, why not allow and encourage public school students to start learning useful job skills and knowledge while they’re in school, and thus reduce the need for higher taxes to pay for expensive prisons?
Educational Priorities
It’s another important educational question: what should be our educational priorities? For example, many high schools today spend more time and money teaching driver’s education than teaching students how to actually build intelligent learning habits! Car dealers, as well as insurance and energy companies all need more customers, and so driver’s ed. remains a bigger priority than, say, building intelligent character habits. Students leave school often feeling they need a car, should pay whatever it costs for gasoline, and not worry about their poisoning everyone’s air or all the carbon they’re adding to our atmosphere.
Respectful sexual habits too often have a very low priority in our public schools, even though they’re useful all through life, would reduce the over 30% of military sexual abuse events, reduce civilian rape cases, and not to mention make life more enjoyable itself. Many children leave school feeling different sexual habits are evil and only theirs are good, thus creating more social stress and friction. To us Deweyans, such educational priorities are in fact dangerous to the growth of a more intelligent and democratic society; their results are both socially expensive and personally frustrating. It’s as if the top priority for our conservative public schools should be keeping students disconnected from learning any kind of useful knowledge. In our poor inner cities, for example, youth employment remains ridiculously high, and thus helping push many of them into violent gangs to protect money-making drug turf. What are our educational priorities? It’s a question more parents, students, and teachers should be asking, isn’t it?
Given all that’s been said so far, shouldn’t intelligent community service work have a much higher learning priority than most all book-facts? The importance of such kind actions was once beautifully expressed by the great comedienne Gracie Allen. On one of her radio shows, after another actor mentioned he was on his way to help someone else, she said: “Isn’t that a wonderful philosophy?” Indeed, what best endures is the good done for others, and yet in our schools where children spend over 1,000 hours every year, such actions have almost no priority compared to book-assignments! Reading about what Edward De Vere wrote about an ancient king of Scotland, Macbeth, or learning more useless facts about our presidents, is said to be excellent education. If it really were excellent, then why not give students the freedom to test that idea, choose all their classes, and see what they feel is most important to learn?
Perhaps the most absurd result of conservative priorities is leaving the children’s needs out of the education process. The main priority of such schools is telling students what they need to learn, rather than allowing them to control the learning market. Building democratic habits is also a low priority in such schools. When will we ever see student representatives regularly elected to School Boards, or curriculum boards? When will it become a higher priority for students to get out into the world and see more of what’s going on out there? During the current AIDS epidemic many of us have seen real bravery and skill at courageously battling the disease. It would be an education in itself to safely expose children who volunteer to see such daily battling, rather than merely reading about it in any book. Doesn’t fighting daily for life require the highest kinds of toughness and bravery? Where should our learning priorities lie, with children’s needs or corporate needs?
Should our school priority lie merely in creating physically easy working conditions for teachers, or in better satisfying student needs to learn some practical and useful skills? Should such enslavement really be called educational excellence? When teachers sit at a desk and hand out writing assignments on a daily basis, and then sometimes read the daily newspaper, it’s physically easy work. But aren’t teachers also supposed to be public servants -- people who work for the BENEFIT of the next generation and their learning needs? Wouldn’t public, socialized tax-monies be much better spent, and wouldn’t young folks become intellectually and morally stronger sooner, if they practiced more the constructive habits of community service work? When done safely and intelligently, where is the harm in learning such skills and knowledge? Aren’t those the ONLY skills and knowledge best capable of improving all the social challenges we still have in our own neighborhoods? What should be our educational priorities?
Nature is, and almost certainly always will be, full of frustrating, resisting, and uncooperative events. Deadly and destructive storms and natural disasters keep teaching us nature does not like civilization. That’s just a basic fact of life. But unless students learn how tension-free work can feel, it keeps making all their work more fatiguing and stressful than it need be. No doubt, it takes some time and practice for such habits to grow, but, then again, what habit doesn't? People will continue feeling energy-draining fatigue unless they teach themselves how to move with a minimum of tension and a maximum of relaxed gracefulness, one day at a time, one project at a time, and even one minute at a time! Either that or they’ll keep relying on drugs to help them relax. If not, then day to day living will continue creating cramping and unnecessary tension needing relief with alcohol, muscle relaxers, marijuana, or other sedatives. Writing more book assignments merely restricts students from learning such important habits. What should be our learning priorities?
Such character habits like gracefulness, even when exercising, can become a much higher priority in more liberal schools. The unrelenting goblin of muscle tension and fatigue will continue having its way unless we start teaching students how to work enjoyably. If not, then eventually freezing the spine into immobility and other painful disorders can result, as many elderly people show us. We’ve seen how active primitive healing rituals, like communal dancing, and spirit-rituals like prayer, have helped reduce such tensions; if they work for you then why not keep using them? But why not also teach students how to relax without such aides? The great use of relaxing drugs, like alcohol and drug use, is yet more evidence such habit-arts of graceful movement are needed more than ever before. So, why not simply assume this idea: the earlier students begin feeling what such tension-free habits are like, the more energy they’ll have to keep learning what they want to learn, including the character habits to make their lives more socially pleasant and rewarding. With experimental learning, even primary age students too can begin feeling how intelligent non-violent, spontaneous, creative playfulness helps beautify the most important time of all—our ever-present here and now. What should be our learning priorities?