Mead’s Philosophy of Education

Abstract

An essay review of

The Philosophy of Education

(Mead, G. H. G. J. J. Biesta & D. Tröhler, Eds. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008)

Notes

Notes

1 I am grateful to Ray McDermott and Dennis Thiessen for their encouragement and many helpful suggestions. The effort has been collegial, but responsibility for remaining errors is—unfortunately—my own.

2 Mead taught the course at the University of Chicago in 1905, 1908, 1909, and 1910, making it likely that he took it over from John Dewey when the latter left for Columbia in 1904.

3 Hegel thought biological species fixed. As a result, what evolved were basic ways of conceiving of nature (Hegel, 1837/1953).

4 Mead and Dewey developed these ideas together, Dewey crediting Mead for major contributions to his theory of emotion (Dewey, 1894, 1895).

5 Some signs may have nonsocial meaning, like thunder serving as a signal of rain in the behavior of an animal. Mead sometimes makes a distinction between social and nonsocial meaning but at other times drops it.

6 Note that a mirror is not always necessary to this process because we can hear ourselves talk, much as others can. This is why vocal gestures are particularly useful and important.

7 The recapituationist overtones of Mead’s analysis might also be questioned, but Mead explicitly disavowed the “culture epoch” theory, arguing that there are only loose parallels between sociocultural evolution and child development (Mead, 2008, pp. 64, 174). This might be compared with the experience in biology which first adopted the view that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, later rejected it, and has recently come to see informative parallels between the two (Carroll, 2006).