“Development as an Aim of Education”: A Reconsideration of Dewey’s Vision

Abstract

Recently, the view that a concept of development should serve as a guiding principle for education has been seriously challenged by developmental psychologists as well as educators. Dewey’s vision of development and progressive education is at the heart of these controversies. This article discusses the place of Dewey’s thinking on these subjects, by first looking back at the changing ways his ideas have been incorporated into educational theory and discourse over the past 80 years. Then, selections from Dewey’s own writing are presented to investigate how his ideas have been misunderstood and misrepresented. A reconsideration of Dewey’s work helps to clarify why it is important for educators to be engaged with a concept of development.

Notes

Notes

1 The behaviorist point of view is an exception because behaviorists argued that children were no different from any other species whose behavior could be explained according to the laws of conditioning. Therefore, changes in behavior could be explained without recourse to a notion of development.

2 Piaget’s work at the Institute Jean‐Jacques Rousseau was another major force for progressive education in Europe. In his writing, Piaget considered themes of progressive education under the headings of “experimental pedagogy” and “active methods,” noting their application in, among other places, Freinet’s work in French Canada (Piaget, 1970, in Gruber & Voneche, 1977, p. 713).

3 Although psychoanalytic views, especially ego psychology, had a strong influence on the early educators at the Bureau in the 1950s (Johnson, Biber), the cognitive developmental view of Piaget was only tentatively embraced in the 1960s and 1970s because of its focus on thinking at the expense of affect and environment (Nager & Shapiro, 2000).

4 In the 1970s, Bank Street psychologists already acknowledged the problem of devising educational interventions from developmental theories based on middle‐class children (Shapiro & Biber, 1972, p. 56).

5 Although some educators cautioned against this, in favor of a more holistic approach (Biber, 1977).

6 Walkerdine subscribes to a poststructuralist view that developmental accounts of children’s lives are always narratives that produce ways of seeing children, and are not objective truths about children (Walkerdine, 1984/1998).
In a different context, Kessen (1979) made a similar point in his article “The American Child and Other Cultural Inventions.”

7 Despite the clear ascendance of constructivist and social constructivist accounts, the semantics of the terms natural and development still often remain conflated. For example, Crain’s (2005) recently revised Theories of Development reasserts the notion that a developmental perspective, following mainly from Rousseau, is characterized by natural tendencies and intrinsic growth factors (pp. xv, 376–377).

8 Dewey’s view here is, of course, only one version of the argument against intrinsic, natural forces. John Locke, and later the behaviorists, posited a very different account of environmental influences.

9 Within psychology, even the purported value‐free technology of behaviorism contains value assumptions about the nature of learning, as Franklin and Biber (1984) clearly demonstrated.