Let's Talk about Dewey

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Dewey Defeats Learning?

We’re potentially in the middle of a shift back to explicit instruction. Now, I don’t have any broad data to support this. I don’t know of any recent surveys or widespread observations of the methods employed by teachers more broadly. Maybe they’re out there but the studies haven’t come across my desk. The closest I have on hand would be some stuff from about ten years ago that makes roughly the same claim as studies ten and twenty years before that. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, for example, has long held that procedural fluency is downstream from conceptual understanding of math. Yet, we see a lot of public commentary around needing more rote memorization in math, such as with times tables. Math edTech products lean toward the rote practices of yesteryear combined with a warm, encouraging chatbot. Saxon Math, a rote mathematics curriculum long popular with homeschoolers and christian academies, is growing in popularity. The push for the science of reading has incorporated more rote learning, even if research doesn’t quite support all of it. Indeed, structured and explicit need not be rote, but that is certainly a quick and obvious solution. Drill and kill those phonemes! Rote also means publishers can produce large amounts of materials for with little effort. That’s how we get a basal curriculum like Into Reading showing up with a nonsensical 7,000+ individual extra “resources” for first grade teachers. What percentage of these are high-quality, relevant, useful instructional resources? Who in your district spent time evaluating these? That’s not the point. The point of rote instruction is volume, quantity, and speed.

One thing you hear expressed alongside expressions of preference for rote learning are criticisms of non-rote methods, especially projects and group work. Those are not the same thing, but nuance is not usually part of these conversations. And, to the point of today’s article, you will sometimes hear people place the blame on Dewey and progressive education which they equate with group projects. According to critics Dewey’s approach has long been the cardinal flaw of American education. “Activities” as his early critics liked to call projects, were only going to lead to chaos as learners followed their natural inclinations to learn what interested them. Moreover, projects come at the cost of rote learning, which is, for its proponents, the best way for students to be taught. Following Dewey (or their version of him, anyways) is only going to hinder learning.

What is Dewey All About?

These criticisms are, I think, wrong on a few grounds. First, the thing we think of as project-based learning today is descended from Dewey but has also changed a lot in 100 years. However, the things we call projects in school are not project-based learning, which is an entire pedagogical and curricular approach that the vast majority of schools do not follow. Just because your teacher assigns you a group project doesn’t mean you’re doing project-based learning. This distinction is important! You’re probably not even mad at Dewey but at Vygotsky and you don’t even know it.

So, if Dewey isn’t the guy telling us to do all this group work and all these projects, what is Dewey actually about? The answer is probably surprising to some but the core of Dewey’s beliefs, including about education, is the rigorous application of science. For Dewey, science is the only valid epistemological project, and it extends beyond the practices of scientists in labs doing experiments. Dewey argues that our own psychology, the way we learn about and experience the world, is fundamentally scientific. It follows that we should engage our need for scientific learning with a system of education built to encourage scientific inquiry and develop the capacity for rigorous scientific reasoning. Dewey felt the best way to do this was for students to follow five steps:

1) Encounter a novel and hard to solve problem (not necessarily student generated)

2) Clarify the nature of the problem (imo this is more or less drawing on background knowledge)

3) Propose solutions based on their knowledge of the subject matter and analyze their potential impacts

4) Hypothesize about the success or failure of a possible best approach

5) Test the hypothesis, preferably in a real-world situation, and evaluate outcomes

Again, this wasn’t just how Dewey wanted classrooms to work, it’s actually how he felt learning worked. It seems like he was on to something. The activities or projects that Dewey wanted were not just some assignments related to the larger curriculum. They were chances for students to engage in scientific reasoning in order to learn something new, to generate knowledge. In fact, Dewey didn’t think this learning was limited to the classroom or to childhood. Famously, Dewey felt that this process also worked at a societal level and that democracy was, at its best, a scientific process by which people empowered the state to solve problems and changed or reformed that power as solutions either worked or failed. Preparing children for scientific thinking also meant preparing them to play their part in making democracy functional. Older members of the polity had a responsibility to bring new members (children, immigrants) into the process and engage them in building rigorous reasoning habits because merely learning the basics needed to survive and function in society would not help the country as a whole. The immature, those who Dewey felt never learned to think rigorously, would drive the country in the wrong direction not because of some innate flaw but because they would not go through the process of scientifically testing policies and learning from successes or failures.

So, let’s pause here before I dive deeper. You have the broad point I wished to make. Dewey isn’t some touchy-feely woo-woo just let kids do whatever they think is fun and call it learning type of figure. Dewey’s core was always the scientific method, and he believe this was the overarching reality of how learning worked, how societies flourished, and how all of us could better arrive at true understanding of the world. If someone says they think Dewey is responsible for all that’s wrong in education, it would be worth asking them if they oppose teaching children how to think scientifically.

Now, if you want a deeper dive into Dewey, here goes.

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Pragmatic Epistemology

Dewey was a pragmatist and drew much of his philosophy from pragmatists of the late 19th century, especially Charles Sanders Pierce. Pierce is a really interesting figure and I wish he and other pragmatists were more well known today. In 1977 Pierce published the essay On the Fixation of Belief. Pierce outlines the role of scientific inquiry in settling beliefs but also identifies three competing and flawed methods. All of these are absolutely essential to grasp if we are to better understand Dewey.

For Pierce, one of the central human psychological drives is to be free from doubt. Doubt, the opposite of belief, is almost disturbing to the point where it drives people to immediate action.

You can already see the connection here to ideas of learning. For Pierce, inquiry is all about eliminating doubt so we can return to the more comfortable experience of belief which allows us to know how and when to act. Dewey uses some similar language in How we Think. Dewey calls this kind of thinking reflective thinking. Reflective thinking ““involves (1) a state of doubt, hesitation, perplexity, mental difficulty, in which thinking originates, and (2) an act of searching, hunting, inquiring, to find material that will resolve the doubt, settle and dispose of the perplexity” (Dewey, p. 121).

To put this another way, humans don’t like it when they don’t know something. We are drawn to creating or discovering what they believe. Pierce sees four paths people may take to arrive at belief. First is the method of tenacity. Someone under the method of tenacity clings to a belief no matter what. “The instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, exaggerated into a vague dread of doubt, makes men cling spasmodically to the views they already take” (Pierce, 1877). Perhaps some explanation worked once and that is the only explanation a person is willing to consider. I also think some conspiracy theories fall under the method of tenacity because all new information is somehow incorporated into the belief system so that the system doesn’t change.

The second method is the method of authority. Put simply you just believe whatever an authority tells you to believe and that authority exercises power to maintain that belief and suppress other beliefs.

He goes on to call this type of belief a kind of intellectual slavery and notes that “Cruelties always accompany this system; and when it is consistently carried out, they become atrocities of the most horrible kind in the eyes of any rational man.” There are some clear implications for authoritarian visions of education here that Dewey definitely picks up later.

The third method is the method of taste. This method is a bit more nuanced, but Pierce is essentially saying that some people arrive at beliefs because they are pleased by them or, in some way, corrupted by some human bias. They pick what they believe based on some factor other than the weight of the evidence.

So, when Plato says the planets are held together by strings, maybe he’s just lacking the ability to gather the evidence needed to understand gravity or whatever. BUT, when Plato then says these strings must be akin to harmonious musical strings, he is doing all of us a disservice. Plato is bringing a human bias into scientific inquiry in order to make a point about the seemingly orderly procession of celestial bodies. The problem is that this tendency continues on and hundreds of years later we have Kepler doing something similar with his theorizing. When someone comes along and is looking for an explanation, a settlement of doubt, it would appear that the choice of explanation is one of taste, not reason. They might prefer the cool music of Plato’s spheres to the circumscribed spheres of regular solids that Kepler talks about even though Kepler is much closer to explaining the real solar system than Plato ever was. They are, therefore, not engaging in true inquiry about facts in the world but in something more like fashion where you just pick what you like.

A modern corollary for the method of taste related to schools might be “teach the controversy” wherein two sides of something are presented as equal and valid even if one side is not actually true: global warming, evolution, slavery, and so on. Opinions on the shape of the earth differ. Pierce would argue that this is wrong and presents reality as a choice. Steven Colbert’s truthiness is another example of this. If we present reality as a variety of choices between multiple equivalent explanations, then people will go with the one that feels true to them even though it’s not a matter of feelings at all.

Belief from tenacity, authority, and taste are all contrasted by Pierce with arriving at belief from scientific investigation. Scientific investigation is the only true way of arriving at knowledge about the world, the only true way of fixing belief and settling doubt. Pierce’s account is very similar to that of Dewey presented above. First, the irritation of doubt spurs an inquiry into possible explanations. Second, possible explanations are applied to the situation at hand to see if they hold. This is the process of logical abduction. Third, the explanation is applied to other similar situations, akin to seeing if a hypothesis is generalizable. This is the process of logical deduction. Finally, the explanation is applied predictively to ever newer situations to test if it holds, akin to testing if a given hypothesis replicates. This is the process of logical induction. At each stage, should the explanation fail to hold, inquiry should begin again to determine new explanations. It is crucial, too, to point out that Peirce believes this is not just a scientific methodology applied to experiments in a laboratory but a process by which any person arrives at an understanding of the world around them. Although he acknowledges that scientific inquiry relies on returning briefly to doubt as new circumstances arise, Peirce (1877) states, “above all, let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief, and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous” (emphasis added). The integrity of belief matters to Pierce and it matters to Dewey.

Integrity of Belief in Schools

One big thing Dewey adds to Pierce is a kind of naturalism of curiosity. Pierce is not really concerned with teaching children, but Dewey is looking at kids, even very young ones, and points out that their natural curiosity and drive to learn is already the initiation of scientific inquiry. Indeed, inquiry is at the heart of Dewey’s understanding of psychology and cognition. We are driven to find answers to questions, to settle doubts, and to find ways to be at peace with the world around us. Like Pierce, Dewey worried that our society would fail to arrive at important truths due to a lack of rigorous thinking and felt that schools were the best way to influence the development of thinking. Of course, that also means they’re the best way to badly influence the development of thinking.

He was worried that, for example, teachers would learn only from their experiences in the classroom and “the controlling habits of the teacher finally get fixed with comparatively little reference to the principles of psychology, logic, or the history of education” (Dewey, The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education, 1904). Teachers, he feared, could cling tenaciously to their preferred ways of doing things instead of learning and inquiring and arriving at broader truths of education. Likewise, Dewey worried that education was too authoritarian. He worried that kids would become “intellectually subservient” to “the eagerness of those in authority to secure immediate practical results at any cost … of the willingness of our teaching corps to accept any method or device which seems to promise good results” (ibid). Note here how worried Dewey was about teachers. Dewey goes on to worry about “the tendency of educational development to proceed by reaction from one thing to another” and for schools to “expend the bulk of their energy upon forms and rules,” on the “routine details of their callings” in a way that is “evidence of the absence of intellectual vitality (ibid). This is the method of taste. While not appealing to the fashionable or pleasurable nature of a belief as Peirce did in, Dewey is making a parallel point. Dewey sees the routinized practice of schools as at risk of chasing fads and enacting practices that feel right but are not the product of scientific inquiry.

Dewey believes strongly that learning has to reflect some underlying principle or reality of the world. To discover those truths, kids have to be engaged in real learning via scientific processes of thinking. The only way for education to have any integrity of belief is if it goes beyond the improper methods of fixating belief. Let’s use an example to better understand what Dewey is going for. Imagine a science class for young-ish kids and the teacher wants to engage students in an inquiry. She may be asking students for some questions they have to see if their curiosity offers any fertile ground for scientific inquiry. Critics should pay attention to that part! Dewey isn’t advocating kids running around asking any old questions. Some questions are not going to advance their thinking in any meaningful way. If a kid answers the teacher’s inquiry by putting out the question “what’s for lunch?” it is not a useful question with an educative purpose. Maybe another kid answers by asking “is the sky really blue?”. Flavors of this question abound. Kids are often curious about colors, perception of colors, and expressions related to color in the natural world. (Indeed, this anecdote is adapted from a real experience I’ve had with 4th grade students.) Here, though, teachers would need to modify the question to make it useful. Let’s follow Dewey’s steps for a bit and see if we can better modify “is the sky really blue?”

Blue Sky Thinking

If our question is “is the sky really blue?” then we need to be thinking of ways we could prove that the sky is blue. We can already imagine kids doing various things. One might find some blue objects or some paint swatches and see if the sky is a similar hue. Another might spend all day looking at the sky. But there could also be some dissenters. Some might point out that when they go up high in a building or on an airplane, the sky above is still blue but there’s no blue under them. “When does the sky stop being clear and start being blue?” they might ask. Another student might point out that the sky is not always blue. It changes colors at different times of day and during different weather conditions. This conversation might go on for a bit before the teacher delivers some kind of content that explains why the sky is blue. Maybe she’d break kids into groups and have them “research” explanations and present them back to the class. Maybe they find a video or talk to an LLM chatbot. It’s blue, of course, because it reflects the ocean. (It’s not but that’s what the teacher I observed told the class and she had a handout to go along with it.) Now that the class has an answer, the lesson is over, and you move on. This is, I’d argue, what an inquiry looks like in most classrooms. The group project is looking up a scientific fact to answer a question. This is the subpar “project-based” learning people complain about as adding little of value. It’s also not what Dewey would want.

What would a Deweyan version look like? For one, the teacher has a more active role in shaping the purpose of the inquiry so that it has more educative value. She might take the original question and instead of having the kids thinking about ways to prove that the sky is blue, she has them trying to explain why the sky is blue. They would pose explanations, and the teacher would help them narrow down a few possibilities. Maybe there are three explanations the kids come up with: air is blue, sunlight is blue, the sky is reflecting the ocean. Our teacher has a job again. She needs to design the ability for the students to be able to test their hypotheses. Maybe she sets up stations for each experiment. One has kids shining white light through different colored gasses collected in vials. Another has prisms breaking down the wavelength of lights. Maybe another one has blue water and space for light to reflect above it into a clear box. Perhaps she also supplies several opalescent materials that scatter different wavelengths of light. Maybe some scientists and science educators could come up with some better ideas here? The point is, they need ways to test their ideas.

Before beginning, the kids would have to make some clear predictions based on their preferred theory. For example, if either sunlight is blue or the air is blue then each experiment should yield a different result. They’d need to spend time doing the experiments and going over their results, discussing it with kids who held other theories, and debating what happened. Here again, the teacher would be supporting the students by keeping them focused on the experiments, on the data, and on their analysis. As time goes on, it should become clear that the “air is blue” theory has more going for it than the others but it’s not a total slam dunk of an explanation. The teacher has to help the kids connect and generalize across the results of all the experiments to recognize that gasses scatter various wavelengths of light and that our atmosphere’s gasses scatter blue light.

Now, you might be shaking your head. James, you may say, you’ve just spent tons of time and effort to get kids to learn what Rayleigh scattering is when they could have looked it up. What’s the point in doing it this way? There are a few. First, the fact they learned is less important than how they learned it. This is Pierce’s integrity of belief. For Dewey, discovering Reyleigh scattering is learning while reading about Rayleigh scattering is not because there is no inquiry in the latter. It’s just accepting something on authority. Moreover, discovering Rayleigh scatting allowed for learning more than just that one fact. The kids learned that different gasses scatter different wavelengths and that the position of the light relative to the gasses acts similarly to a prism, scatting wavelengths in different directions. That also means they can explain why the sky is blue AND why sunsets are red and orange. They may also have disproven a widely believed myth, that the sky reflects the ocean. Indeed, they may have found out that the opposite is true. In doing the experiment, the project, the students have had a chance to learn more than the single fact. They have learned an important principle that lets them more accurately understand the real world they live in as well as understood how to arrive at the knowledge of that principle.

How Matters

There is more to Dewey’s thought than just this explanation, but it really does irk me when people want to lambast all of progressive education and Dewey and then they’re really just mad about cruddy group work. My guess is that if you asked most people if they want schools to promote rigorous scientific thinking, they’d say yes. What I hoped to get across today is that this style of thinking is also based on an appreciation for the way in which we learn. Humans are not built to learn everything simply by being presented with facts and procedures. We can do that, but it is sometimes superficial learning that serves our system of schooling more than it serves the needs of the kids. Sadly, doing it Dewey’s way is hard. One, he expects a lot of teachers. They aren’t lecturers or sages on stages, but they also aren’t mere facilitators. Guiding an inquiry is slow and requires time to build on each previous step. It also requires teachers to have a strong understanding of learning and development in addition to the subject matter. Deweyan style inquiries can need costly supplies and the even more scarce resource, time. Still, how we teach matters. I worry that we’ve come under the spell of the idea that access to information is the same as being able to learn from it and that others’ knowledge is just as good as knowledge we gain ourselves. We should be wary of approaches that teach our children to refuse to change their beliefs, that beliefs come from authority, or that beliefs are always a matter of personal choice.

Thaks for reading!