Dewey's Materialist Philosophy of Education: A Resource for Critical Pedagogues?

Abstract

This article looks at some similarities and differences between key elements of Karl Marx's critique of capital and John Dewey's philosophy of education, both substantively and methodologically. Substantively, their analyses of the relation between human beings and the natural world—what Marx calls concrete labour and Dewey generally calls action—converge. Similarly, methodologically they converge when looked at from the point of view of their analysis of the relation between earlier and later forms of life. In Marx's case, it is his comparison of the relation between capitalist society and earlier societies. In Dewey's case, it is his comparison of the relation between adult experience and childhood experience. Dewey's practical realization of his distinction of adult and childhood experience in the creation of a materialist curriculum embodied in the Dewey laboratory school in Chicago (of which Dewey was director from 1896 to 1904) also accords in many ways with Marx's theory of concrete labour. On the other hand, their analyses diverge substantively when viewed from the point of view of their critique of capitalist society; Marx united concrete labour with his concept of abstract labour to provide a basis for criticizing modern society on its own terms rather than in terms of Dewey's concept of a cultural lag. The divergence is explained by their divergent methodologies in analyzing modern capitalist society. Despite this difference, the article concludes that critical pedagogues would do well to incorporate Dewey's materialist curriculum into their own practices—with modifications.

Notes

Notes

1. Paula Allman, Critical Education against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx and Revolutionary Critical Education (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2001).

2. Greg Seals, Education Itself: The Ontology of Inquiry in Dewey's Later Logic (PhD dissertation, Georgia State University, 1998), 53–56.

3. Jim Garrison, “Dewey's Theory of Emotions: The Unity of Thought and Emotion in Naturalistic Functional ‘Co-ordination’ of Behavior,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39.3 (2003): 405.

4. Tony Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and Its Critics: From Hegel to Analytical Marxism and Postmodernism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 36–38.

5. Paulo Freire and Donald Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), 82. Other writers have noted Freire's tendency toward idealism. Richard Gibson, The Promethean Literacy: Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Reading, Praxis and Liberation (PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1994), 19, available at: www.rohan.sdsu.edu/∼rgibson/freirall.htm 19; Frank Youngman, Adult Education and Socialist Pedagogy (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 163.

6. Context over Foundations: Dewey and Marx, ed. William Gavin (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988).

7. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 290.

8. John Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 1 (1916), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 207.

9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 85.

10. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, 1946), 195.

11. Patrick Murray, Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 121–29.

12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 493.

13. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Collected Works, vol. 5, 1845–1847 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 42.

14. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 42.

15. Marx, Grundrisse, 84.

16. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 48.

17. George L. Kline, “The Myth of Marx’ Materialism,” in Philosophical Sovietology: The Pursuit of a Science, ed. Helmut Dahm, Thomas J. Blakeley and George L. Kline (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988), 162–63.

18. Ibid., 158.

19. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), 23.

20. Tim Ingold, Evolution and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 222–92.

21. Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” 44.

22. Ingold, Evolution and Social Life, 308–9.

23. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 7.

24. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1929), 174.

25. Tom W. Goff, Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 88. Marx, indirectly, argued for a similar idea in his analysis of the difference in the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus: “it can be said of the atom that the declination is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” in Collected Works, vol. 1, Karl Marx, 1835–1843 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 49.

26. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 21.

27. R. F. Price, Marx and Education in Late Capitalism (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1986), x–xi.

28. John Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 2, 1902–1903, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 271–91.

29. Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” 274–75.

30. Ibid., 274.

31. Ibid., 278.

32. Ibid., 273.

33. Marx, Grundrisse, 105.

34. Ibid., 105–6.

35. Ibid., 107–8.

36. Karl Marx, Texts on Method, ed. Terrell Carver (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 198.

37. Marx, Grundrisse, 106–7.

38. Ibid., 101.

39. George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3.

40. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 324.

41. Ibid., 24.

42. Ibid., 223.

43. Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 (New York: Atherson Press, 1966), 296.

44. John Dewey, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1933), 216.

45. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 208–9.

46. Ibid., 305.

47. Mayhew and Edwards, The Dewey School, 95–116.

48. Ibid., 115.

49. Cited in Scott Meikle, Aristotle's Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 8.

50. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Letter to Engels,” in Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 180.

51. Ibid., 186.

52. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 289–91.

53. Theo Nichols and Huw Beynon, Living with Capitalism: Class Relations and the Modern Factory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 13–14.

54. Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1998).

55. Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 190–264.

56. The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 386.

57. Ibid., 386–87.

58. Ibid., 387.

59. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 130.

60. Ibid., 135.

61. Ibid., 136–37.

62. Robert W. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 178–79.

63. Ibid., 179; Richard Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 509–11.

64. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 162.

65. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 128.

66. Dewey, Logic, 215.

67. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 159–60.

68. John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 11, 1935–1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 31.

69. Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and Its Critics, 43–44.

70. Mayhew and Edwards, The Dewey School, 123.

71. Ibid., 117–18.

72. Clarence J. Karier and David Hogan, “Schooling, Education and the Structure of Social Reality,” Educational Studies 10.3 (1979): 245–66.

73. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 223.

74. Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education, 510.

75. Thomas Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition (London: Martin Robertson, 1974).

76. Irving M. Abella, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the Communist Party, and the Canadian Labour Congress, 1935–1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).

77. The relation of employers to employees is broader than that of capital to wage labour, but many employees who do not work for capitalist employers work for the bureaucratic and dictatorial capitalist state; both public sector and private sector employees face similar situations to the extent that they depend economically on selling their labour power to an impersonal power.

78. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 109. Agriculture is not directly linked to the money circuit since farmers may not be capitalists.

79. Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” 328–29.

80. Leo Panitch, Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 166.

81. Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition, 13–28.

82. Michael L. Schwalbe, The Psychosocial Consequences of Natural and Alienated Labor (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 166–67.

83. Panitch, Renewing Socialism, 185.